{‘I uttered complete nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for several moments, saying utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut 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. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, totally immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head 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 delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
