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Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I improvised for a short while, saying utter gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over years of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start trembling wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, 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 initial try-out 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 more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 first line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked