{‘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 international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over years of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control 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 left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow 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 intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
