{‘I spoke complete gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over years of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview 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 strong Black Country accent – and {looked
