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Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering complete gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over years of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

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

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked