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Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused 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 said – even if he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying total twaddle in role.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over years of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, 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 rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked