{‘I spoke total twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into 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 show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over decades of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, fully immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
