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Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did reappear to conclude the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying complete gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over years of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

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

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering 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-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, totally lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance 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 stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked