{‘I uttered complete gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the persona 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators 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 sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training 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 try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years 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 accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
