{‘I delivered complete twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Nerves

Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting 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 Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, speaking utter gibberish in role.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over decades of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, 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 began to cloud over. My legs would start shaking wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

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 liberated, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

View image in fullscreen

She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all 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 captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked