{‘I uttered complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly 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 fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for several moments, saying complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over years of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators 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 extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest 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 show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
