{‘I uttered complete gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves

Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all right under the gaze. 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 explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I improvised for a short while, saying complete nonsense in character.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, fully immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the character 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 developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

View image in fullscreen

She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail 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 inducing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than factory work. 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 notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked