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Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering complete twaddle in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over years of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start shaking wildly.”

The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the character 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 grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked