{‘I delivered utter nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
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 rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the persona 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 intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. 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, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time 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 listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
