{‘I delivered complete nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for a short while, uttering total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over years of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his live shows, presenting his own writing. 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 character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
