{‘I uttered complete twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over a long career of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, completely engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
