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Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for a short while, speaking complete twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over a long career of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing filled him with 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 performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the persona in?’” 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 nerves.”

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She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked