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Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying total nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over decades of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

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

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. 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, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked