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Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to finish the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out 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 give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I winged it for several moments, speaking total nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over a long career of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, completely immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, 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 dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked