{‘I spoke utter gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to 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 persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I winged it for several moments, saying complete twaddle in role.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over years of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

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

The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright went away, 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, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial 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 bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked