{‘I delivered total twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show 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 opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying utter gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over decades of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking 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 dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”

He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, completely immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked