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Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did return to finish the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, saying complete gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over years of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 words got stuck 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 guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls 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 had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing 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 symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked