{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, fully engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama 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 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 “frightened”. Years 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 heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
