{‘I delivered utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance 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 press night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I winged it for a short while, saying total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over years of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, fully engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised 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 opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance 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 looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “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 total distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked