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Derek Jacobi experienced a bout 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 illness”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

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

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, fully immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “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 recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”

His first 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 “petrified”. 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 uttered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked