{‘I spoke complete nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves

Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a world tour 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 illness”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be 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 remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for a short while, uttering total gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start shaking wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very 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 bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. 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 opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked