{‘I delivered total twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued 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 made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the character in?’” 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 comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, 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, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time 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 heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
