{‘I spoke utter twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking complete nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “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 recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable 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 notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked