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Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for several moments, uttering total gibberish in role.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. 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 go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very 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 bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked