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Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to finish the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ 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 catch me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, saying complete twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over years of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled 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 lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

He endured that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, 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 connecting to the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, completely lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified 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 opening line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked