{‘I delivered utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over a long career of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw 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 ignore them.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer 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 captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
