{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging 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 ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, completely engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. 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 play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
