[2] Her work in comedy began as a result of starring in a Donmar Warehouse play called Songs For Stray Cats and hearing the audience invited to supply lines and ideas for improvisers appearing in after-show cabaret.
[3][4] From 1994–96, Lawrence played Katharine in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Taming of the Shrew in both Stratford-upon-Avon and London, for which she received a Dame Peggy Ashcroft award for Best Actress.
[5] She also appeared in Faust and The Cherry Orchard and starred as Benedick in an all-female production of Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare's Globe, having played Beatrice previously at Manchester's Royal Exchange.
She made her West End theatre debut in 2001 taking over the lead role of Anna in the stage musical The King and I, replacing Elaine Paige.
In 2008, Lawrence took the lead role in Tom Stoppard's Hapgood at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and later at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in which she was a secret spymaster given the task of exposing a traitor who is leaking vital information to the Russians.
[7] In the same year, she co-directed The Time Step, a comedy about fantasies and talent contests, with Linda Marlowe at the Edinburgh Festival.
[8] Lawrence appeared as Madame Ranevskaya in a new version of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, translated by Tom Stoppard, at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in autumn 2010.
She went on to perform in Sealed with a Loving Kiss and Lunch in the Park as part of the Paul Merton in Galton and Simpson's... series on 16 February 1996 and 21 October 1997.
Lawrence played Mrs Janet Haines,[16] head teacher of a school where sixteen children were admitted to the emergency department having taken LSD.
[19] In 2018, she played the lover of a married man portrayed by former "Whose Line" castmate John Sessions in the feature film Finding Your Feet.
In 2020, she appeared in the BBC television series Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators episode 3.5 "Thy Fury Spent" as Dr Helen Middleton.
Lawrence made her debut appearance in the long-running BBC Radio 4 show Just a Minute on 7 January 2008 and returned again in the following series.
In December 2014, Lawrence played the role of Agnes Nutter in an adaptation of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's book Good Omens for BBC Radio 4.
She has also recorded books from Emma Thomson's [d] Felicity Wishes, Eric Hill's Spot the Dog and Tony Bradman's Dilly the Dinosaur, as well as Philip Ridley's Mercedes Ice and Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's Room on the Broom as well as the 2005 Muffin The Mule story books for a grand CD release.
For adults, Lawrence has recorded audiocassettes of Rosie Thomas's Sun at Midnight, Lynne Truss's Going Loco and Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn.
In 2003, Lawrence spent eight months walking across China, Cuba, Peru and Tanzania for Breakthrough Breast Cancer and helped to raise over £550,000.
[26] Lawrence and Shane Richie participated in the final leg of the celebrity Around the World in 80 Days challenge to raise money for Children in Need 2009.