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Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. 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 quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for several moments, saying complete gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over decades of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recollects 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 had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked