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Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to finish the show.

Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying utter gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over decades of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recollects 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 had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”

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