{‘I spoke utter twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally lose yourself in the role. 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 distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
