{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the unknown 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 addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases 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 stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
