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Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for a short while, saying total gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over years of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all 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 production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked