{‘I delivered total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal found the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome 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 set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering total gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin shaking wildly.”

The nerves didn’t ease 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood 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 block them out.’”

The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let 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 excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised 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 truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked