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Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ 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 locate me.’”

Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for several moments, saying complete gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if 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 audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the persona to emerge?’” 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 intimidated. “I’ve grown up 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 first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”

His debut 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 “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked