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Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a international run 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 disease”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – 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 gripped by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking complete gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over a long career of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin shaking wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

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

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, fully lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked