{‘I uttered utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised 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 block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. 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 uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best 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 production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
