{‘I delivered utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render 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 aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over a long career of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the role to emerge?’” 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 developed 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 actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first 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”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
