{‘I uttered utter gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into 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 talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for several moments, saying utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over decades of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
