{‘I delivered complete nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge 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 maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. 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 standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years 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 heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
