{‘I spoke complete nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a world tour 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 illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for several moments, uttering complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves 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 space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the persona through?’” 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 daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at 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, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
