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Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter gibberish in role.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over decades of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, totally lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the role 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 daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was better than manual labor. 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 told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked