{‘I delivered total gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over years of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze 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 trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled 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 continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his nerves. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked