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Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out 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 give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal found the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying total gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure 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 informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked