{‘I delivered total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying utter gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start knocking wildly.”

The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very 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 respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked