{‘I delivered utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for a short while, uttering complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over a long career of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing 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 listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer 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”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked