{‘I delivered total gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her protected 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 aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over years of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing 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 relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be captured 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 initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
