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Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding 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 exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for a short while, uttering complete twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over years of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”

He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. 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 really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. 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 heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 delivered his first line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked