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Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal found the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, totally immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. 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 standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all 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 show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked