{‘I delivered total gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. 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, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, completely immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
