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Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. 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 totally gone,” he said – though he did return to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for a short while, speaking complete gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over years of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “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 first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked