{‘I spoke utter nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave 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 factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for a short while, uttering complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over a long career of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit 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 daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “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 overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. 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 spoke his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
