{‘I uttered total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over years of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
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 experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
