{‘I spoke total gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, 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 began to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment 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 went away, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “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 total distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest 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 show would be captured 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 uttered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
