{‘I spoke utter twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal found the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I winged it for several moments, uttering complete twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start trembling wildly.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the role 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 intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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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 had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

His initial 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 “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked