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Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I improvised for several moments, saying utter twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin shaking wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first 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 totally lost it.”

He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, totally immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked