{‘I uttered complete gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I improvised for several moments, saying utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge 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 bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
