{‘I uttered utter nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over decades of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, fully lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut 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 “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
