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Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – 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 actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for several moments, speaking total nonsense in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen 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 first preview 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 more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that show but the director 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 spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”

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. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying 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 safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out 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, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”

His debut 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 “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked