{‘I delivered total twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over years of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, 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 dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader 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 spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His debut 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 “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
