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Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking utter nonsense in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped 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 show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his live shows, presenting 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 character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “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 recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked