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

Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to conclude the show.

Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt 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 factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying utter twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, completely immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “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 opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”

His debut 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”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked