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Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.

Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying complete gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over decades of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze 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 lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

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

The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked