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Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing 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 ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, saying complete nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start shaking wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at concealing 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, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing 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 typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up 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 pure escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. 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 opening line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked