{‘I uttered utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over a long career of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods 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 stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. 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 hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified 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 selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
