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

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal found the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I improvised for a short while, uttering utter nonsense in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over a long career of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would start shaking wildly.”

The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the first preview. “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 initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was better than manual labor. 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 told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked