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Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I improvised for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over years of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “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 stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked