{‘I spoke complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening 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 find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “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, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, completely engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue 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 extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is nothing 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 endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
