{‘I spoke complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – 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 performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over decades of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if 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 general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted 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 recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
