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

Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, speaking total nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, 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 interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators 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 drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was superior 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 notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some 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 opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked