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Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over decades of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting 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 acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness 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 responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time 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 accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked