{‘I delivered utter twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over years of stage work. When he began as an beginner, 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 began to become unclear. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the director 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 lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, totally lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised 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 opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. 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 first line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
