{‘I uttered complete gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves

Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. 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 – though he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, speaking total nonsense in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over years of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

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

The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “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 recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking 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, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was better than manual labor. 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 told the play would be recorded 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 delivered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked