{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves

Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a early show 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 trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. 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 locate me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I improvised for several moments, uttering total nonsense in character.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at 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 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 recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed 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 had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard 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 sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to hold on 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 huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator 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 drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. 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 notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked