{‘I uttered total twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So how and why 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 explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. 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 realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, totally engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “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 opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His first 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 “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
