{‘I uttered complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over years of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, fully engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised 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 initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
