{‘I spoke utter gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected 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 aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over years of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the role to emerge?’” 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 daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
