{‘I uttered total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering complete gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start trembling wildly.”

The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, completely immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked