{‘I uttered total gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves

Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for several moments, speaking total gibberish in role.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over decades of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators 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 breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long 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 perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked