{‘I delivered complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal loss – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over a long career of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole 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 saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if 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 house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, completely immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial 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 lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
