{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I improvised for a short while, uttering total nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”

The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the persona through?’” 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 comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recalls 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 experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first 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 bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked