{‘I spoke complete gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I improvised for a short while, saying total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the role 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 been raised 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 initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling 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 hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked