{‘I delivered utter twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden 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 lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona 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 lines returned. I winged it for several moments, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over years of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 lost 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 act but the director 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 block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
