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Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying complete nonsense in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over decades of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space 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 intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked