{‘I spoke total nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking utter nonsense in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood 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 left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. 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 heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 spoke his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked