{‘I delivered complete gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over decades of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out 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, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
