{‘I uttered utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over years of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking 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 more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the director 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 illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified 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 cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
