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Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying utter nonsense in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over years of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

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

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, fully lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “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 remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be filmed 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 opening line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked