{‘I uttered utter twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the spotlight. 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 describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ 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 locate me.’”

Syal found the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I winged it for a short while, saying utter gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start trembling wildly.”

The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the role 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 daunted. “I’ve grown up 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 initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t looking at 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 typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “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 distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years 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 listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked