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Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced 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 whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking utter gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over years of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start shaking wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview 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 increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the role 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”

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