{‘I delivered total gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over decades of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, fully engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. 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 opening line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
