{‘I uttered complete nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for a short while, saying complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over years of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, fully immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest 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 play would be captured 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 delivered his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
