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Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview 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 give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for several moments, uttering complete gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” 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 talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked