{‘I uttered total nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering complete gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over years of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”

The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, totally lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling 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 blames self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”

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