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Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected 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 cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking complete twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over decades of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

He endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the character to emerge?’” 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 initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, 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 dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some 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 initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked