{‘I delivered complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for a short while, saying complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over decades of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the character 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 daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. 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 notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
