{‘I delivered utter twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for several moments, saying utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over years of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended 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 got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
