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Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying utter twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over years of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The instant 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 persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the house lights 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 performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. 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 character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked