{‘I uttered utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I winged it for several moments, speaking complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over decades of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. 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, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “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 first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing 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 rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
