{‘I spoke utter gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering complete twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over years of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”

The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that show 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 lights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages 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 opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards 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 take a deep breath, like your breath 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 obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his stage fright. A back condition ended his hopes 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 got in. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be filmed 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 uttered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked