{‘I delivered total twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over decades of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, 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 completely unfamiliar 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 initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years 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 heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked