{‘I spoke complete twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves

Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering total twaddle in role.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over years of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”

He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, 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 heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college 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 persevered because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best 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 production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked