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Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed 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 perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at 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 typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked