{‘I delivered complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own verse. 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 yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods 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 stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, 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 listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally 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 industrial jobs. 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 production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
