{‘I delivered total nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance 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 leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for several moments, saying utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over decades of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was better than manual labor. 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 production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
