{‘I uttered utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over decades of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, fully lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers 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 succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, 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 lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
