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Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, not to mention a complete 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 classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for several moments, uttering utter gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over years of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would start knocking wildly.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director kept the audience lighting 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 doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, fully immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. 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, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign 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 industrial jobs. I was going to give my all 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 first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked