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Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for a short while, speaking complete gibberish in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over years of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”

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

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – 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 attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked