{‘I uttered complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over decades of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves 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 initial try-out 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 whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised 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 maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, completely engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
