{‘I delivered utter nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly 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 ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over a long career of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking 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 lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, completely immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “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 motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all 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 production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
