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Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all right under the gaze. So how and why 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 find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I winged it for a short while, saying utter twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at 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, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was better 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 play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked