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Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total twaddle in character.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over years of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked