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Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome 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 stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking complete twaddle in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over decades of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start trembling wildly.”

The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. 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, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”

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