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Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the void 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 scene and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering utter nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked