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Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door 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 persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I improvised for a short while, uttering complete gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing 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 stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

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