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Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for several moments, saying total gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over years of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start trembling wildly.”

The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing 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 presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome 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 dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked