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Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying utter nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over years of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire 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 charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing 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 uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, totally lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised 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 go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”

His debut 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 “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked