{‘I spoke complete gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out 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 courage to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over years of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all 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 show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
