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

Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for several moments, saying total twaddle in character.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start shaking wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked