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

Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to finish the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal block – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for a short while, uttering total gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking 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 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 completely lost it.”

He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than factory work. 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 play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked