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Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did return to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up 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 script reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying complete nonsense in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over years of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start trembling wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

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

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, totally lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods 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 remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words 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 take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing 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 sheer relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked