{‘I delivered utter gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode 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 led some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over decades of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as 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 safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
