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Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did come back to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying total nonsense in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

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

The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, fully engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the role to emerge?’” 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 overwhelmed. “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 initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing 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 stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best 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 show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked