{‘I delivered total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Nerves

Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to finish the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, uttering complete twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over decades of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”

The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”

He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “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 recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all 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 show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. 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 delivered his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked