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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 premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden 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 promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking utter nonsense in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start trembling wildly.”

The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted 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 first 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 utterly lost it.”

He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign 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 superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked