{‘I delivered utter twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking total twaddle in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin shaking wildly.”

The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking 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 words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, 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 liberated, release, fully immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked