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Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete twaddle in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

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

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years 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 listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked