{‘I spoke total gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away 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 haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing 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, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome 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 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 initial line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked