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Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I improvised for a short while, speaking total gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over decades of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “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 recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”

His initial 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”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked