{‘I delivered total twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her immune 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 factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over years of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina 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 freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing 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, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
