{‘I spoke utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing 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 frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show 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, saying total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over a long career of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance 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 more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority 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 vigor for stage work but loves his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” 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 observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut 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”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
