{‘I uttered utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I improvised for a short while, saying total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing 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 got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the persona to emerge?’” 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 intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was preferable 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 notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
