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Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to finish the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, saying utter twaddle in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over decades of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing 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 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 air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked