{‘I spoke utter gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her protected 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 cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at concealing 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely 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 manual labor. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
