{‘I delivered complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves

Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian 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 trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at 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. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying complete twaddle in role.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze 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 lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge 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 existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”

His first 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”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked