{‘I uttered complete twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for a short while, speaking total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow 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 delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed 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 respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His initial 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 “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
