{‘I uttered total gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages 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 really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best 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 play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
