{‘I uttered complete twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued 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 entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I improvised for several moments, speaking total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over a long career of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, 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 started to become unclear. My legs would start shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His debut 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 “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
