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Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over a long career of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”

He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, fully engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the persona 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 intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recalls the night of the first preview. “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 swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome 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 opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked