{‘I uttered total gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the guide 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 illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept 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, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the role to emerge?’” 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 safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very 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 typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be filmed 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 opening line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
