{‘I uttered utter nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on 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 made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit 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 intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing 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 rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was superior 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 told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
