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Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to finish the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal block – all right under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “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 talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, saying total nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over decades of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”

The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his live shows, 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 yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. 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, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked