{‘I spoke utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape 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 stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over years of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” 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 standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
