{‘I delivered total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to finish the show.

Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for several moments, speaking utter nonsense in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over decades of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start trembling wildly.”

The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, totally immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. 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 initial instance I’d felt 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 facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was preferable 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 notified the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked