{‘I spoke total twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over a long career of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw 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 ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually 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 first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out 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 rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
