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Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I improvised for several moments, saying utter twaddle in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over decades of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw 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 block them out.’”

The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, totally engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”

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