{‘I spoke total twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview 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 more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome 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 “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
