{‘I spoke utter twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the void 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 addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for a short while, speaking complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over years of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, completely engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. 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 informed the production 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 opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
