{‘I delivered total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did come back to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor 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 exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for a short while, speaking utter twaddle in role.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over decades of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”

The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “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, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, totally lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “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 initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was better 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 told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some 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 first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked