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

Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for a short while, speaking total nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

He got through that act but the leader 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 spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, fully engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his nerves. A back condition ruled out 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 enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”

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