{‘I uttered utter nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to conclude the show.

Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting 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 open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, speaking utter twaddle in persona.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over years of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start trembling wildly.”

The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, completely lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

View image in fullscreen

She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest 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”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked