{‘I delivered complete nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked