{‘I delivered utter twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves

Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited 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 complete physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role 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 brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for a short while, saying utter gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing 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 indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest 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 play would be recorded 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 opening line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked