{‘I spoke utter twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves

Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I winged it for a short while, uttering utter gibberish in role.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over a long career of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”

The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”

He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command 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 maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving 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 opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

View image in fullscreen

She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words 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 sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied 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 continued because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable 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 notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked