{‘I spoke total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal block – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over decades of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial 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 bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked