{‘I uttered total nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. 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 notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked