{‘I delivered total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I improvised for several moments, speaking total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over a long career of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the character 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 intimidated. “I’ve grown up 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 initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” 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 addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut 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”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
