{‘I uttered complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through 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 interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, completely immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
