{‘I uttered complete twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I improvised for several moments, saying total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, 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 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 trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs 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 air is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked