{‘I spoke total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over years of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained 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 better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the persona 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 nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “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 overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first 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”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
