{‘I spoke total nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over years of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough 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 openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow 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 excited 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 remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. 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 rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. 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 told the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. 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 perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
