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

Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking utter nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over decades of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start trembling wildly.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. 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 small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. 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 play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 delivered his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked