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Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led 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 said – although he did reappear to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto 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 persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering utter nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over years of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would start trembling wildly.”

The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to 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. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. 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 everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked