{‘I delivered utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal loss – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for a short while, saying total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over years of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome 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 interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be filmed 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 spoke his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
