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Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal loss – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for a short while, uttering total twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over years of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole 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 realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, totally engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed 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 truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked