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Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered 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 whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering complete twaddle in role.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over decades of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”

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 masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full 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 realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best 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 show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked