{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over a long career of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire 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 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 kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
