{‘I delivered total nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then immediately 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 role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I improvised for several moments, uttering utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over years of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. 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 fear went away, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the character to emerge?’” 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve developed 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 initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer 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 captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
