{‘I delivered total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over years of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking 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 froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing 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 pure relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
