{‘I delivered total gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to 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 remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over a long career of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, totally immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting 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 overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be recorded 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 heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
