{‘I uttered complete nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door 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 nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I improvised for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over decades of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, completely engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow 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 intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His debut 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 “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 perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
