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Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal found the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking utter twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over decades of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”

He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, fully immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked