{‘I delivered complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. 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 catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I winged it for several moments, speaking complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing 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 words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was poised 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 obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. 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 notified the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
