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Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, facing 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 monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking utter nonsense in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over years of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”

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 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming 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 audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, completely engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial 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 interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”

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