{‘I uttered complete nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for several moments, saying total twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over a long career of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

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

The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting 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 opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, completely engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest 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 production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked