{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show 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 leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced 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 little think to myself until the words returned. I improvised for a short while, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his nerves. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last 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 beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
