{‘I uttered utter nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did reappear to finish the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of 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 moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering total gibberish in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked