{‘I uttered complete gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over years of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader 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 spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, completely engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was superior than factory work. 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 told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
