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

Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. 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 locate me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total twaddle in role.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”

The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”

He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood 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 kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his live shows, presenting 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 yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

View image in fullscreen

She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”

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