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Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking utter gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over years of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start shaking wildly.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking 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 lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “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 initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked