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Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading 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 courage to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I improvised for several moments, saying utter nonsense in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over decades of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued 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 trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

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

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up 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 initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing 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 continued because it was total relief – and was superior than manual labor. 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 play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked