{‘I uttered total nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves

Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself 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 make her protected 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 aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering total nonsense in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over decades of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”

The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his performances, delivering his own verse. 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 you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “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 initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing 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, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be filmed 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 uttered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked