{‘I delivered complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over a long career of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, 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 dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. 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 notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some 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 heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
