{‘I uttered total gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled 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 recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
