{‘I uttered utter twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over years of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
