{‘I delivered utter twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for a short while, saying complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over decades of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast 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, totally lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was better 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 told the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
