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Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued 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 made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering total nonsense in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over years of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”

The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed 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 opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators 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 lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all 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 “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview 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 distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked