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Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal block – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I winged it for several moments, uttering utter twaddle in role.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start knocking wildly.”

The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing 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 indicators 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 emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”

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