{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed 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 become unclear. My legs would begin shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety 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 froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through 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 connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. 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, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
