{‘I spoke utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? 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 end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role 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 script came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over a long career of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, 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 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 worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that show but the director 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 illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
