{‘I spoke utter gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a international run 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 disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “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 self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very 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 bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 uttered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
