{‘I spoke utter gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching 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 air is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended 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 got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His debut 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”. 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 delivered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
