{‘I spoke total twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished 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 trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over a long career of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge 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 majority of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
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 felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching 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 breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His initial 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 “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
