{‘I spoke total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical 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.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, saying complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the character in?’” 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 grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
