{‘I uttered complete nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi endured a instance 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 compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying complete gibberish in role.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over years of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 stuck 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 act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control 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 maintained the general illumination 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 majority of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome 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 captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked