{‘I delivered complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves

Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal loss – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal found the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking complete nonsense in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over years of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”

The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that act but the leader 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 spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some 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 initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked