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

Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out 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 honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking complete gibberish in role.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the character 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 daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked