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Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did return to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for several moments, speaking complete gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over decades of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recollects the night of the first preview. “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 addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. 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 hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked