{‘I uttered complete nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance 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 compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the unknown 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 moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over years of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved 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 get hazy. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit 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 recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
