{‘I uttered utter nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves

Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did return to finish the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. 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 catch me.’”

Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed 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 lines reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking utter nonsense in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

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

The director left the audience lighting 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 improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright 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 live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, fully immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked