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Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect 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 going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for a short while, uttering utter gibberish in role.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying 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 performance anxiety.”

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She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was preferable 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 captured 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 listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked