{‘I uttered total gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for a short while, speaking total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
