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Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of 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 walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking total gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over years of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that act but the guide 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 spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up 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 initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms 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 chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was better than factory work. 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 told the production 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 uttered his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked