{‘I delivered total gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over years of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” 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 enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some 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 perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked