{‘I delivered total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Nerves

Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for several moments, speaking complete gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”

The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”

He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control 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 left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted 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 recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”

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