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Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for several moments, saying utter twaddle in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over decades of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, 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 dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly 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 opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked