{‘I delivered utter nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for several moments, saying total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over years of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up 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 opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” 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 get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing 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 pure distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best 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 play 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 delivered his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
