{‘I uttered complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for several moments, speaking complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, completely immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls 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 managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
