{‘I spoke complete nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear 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 premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how 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 explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for a short while, uttering total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over years of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled 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 wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome 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 “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
