{‘I delivered total twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for several moments, speaking utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over years of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really 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 first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
