{‘I delivered complete nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I improvised for several moments, speaking complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, totally immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ended his dreams 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 got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
