{‘I spoke total twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for several moments, saying utter gibberish in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” 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 motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”

His initial 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 “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked