{‘I spoke total twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I improvised for several moments, speaking total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights 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 pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the persona through?’” 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 intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded 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 spoke his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
