{‘I delivered total twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over years of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control 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 kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked