{‘I uttered utter twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods 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 stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best 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 “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
