{‘I delivered total gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance 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 illness”. It has even caused 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 – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” 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 leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona 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 words reappeared. I winged it for a short while, saying complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, completely lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit 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 delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
