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Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. 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 mustered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking total twaddle in character.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would start shaking wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest 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 production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years 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 heard my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked