{‘I uttered complete twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves

Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I winged it for several moments, uttering total twaddle in character.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over years of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, totally immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best 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 production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked