{‘I delivered complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all 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 show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview 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 pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
