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Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal found the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, uttering total gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would start knocking wildly.”

The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked