{‘I spoke total twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” 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 way out leading to the yard 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 continued through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over a long career of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
