{‘I spoke total twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for a short while, uttering utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over years of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed 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 initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked