{‘I spoke utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. 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 completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal loss – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out 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 cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over years of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his performances, presenting his own verse. 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 yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow 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 delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed 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 first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
