{‘I delivered utter nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on 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 entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over years of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very 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, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be filmed 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 uttered his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
