{‘I uttered utter gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over a long career of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The stage fright 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 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the persona 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted 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 persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to give my all to overcome 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
