{‘I delivered utter gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly 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 escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I improvised for several moments, saying total twaddle in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over years of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”

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

The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the character 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 grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recollects 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 managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked