{‘I spoke total nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for a short while, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over years of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, 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 words got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the role through?’” 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised 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 first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
