{‘I uttered utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard 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 immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for several moments, uttering total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over years of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best 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 production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
