{‘I delivered utter twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves

Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? 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 know, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for a short while, uttering total nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”

The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

He endured that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised 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 first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words 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 extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked