The Wobbly Vertical Video: On Performing for Someone Who's Loved You Since Before You Could Act

Every actor has a horror story about a bad audience. The drunk heckler. The man who slept through the second act and woke up to applaud, confusingly, at the wrong moment. The school party who treated The Cherry Orchard like a football match.

I have those too. But my most consistent audience member isn't a stranger at all. She's five foot two, she takes her coat off halfway through Act One regardless of the heating, and she has seen literally everything I've ever done. Yes. It's my mum.

The Full Archive

We're talking the complete back catalogue. The nativity where I played a shepherd and forgot which side of the stage the stable was on. The Year 9 production of Bugsy Malone where I got splattered with custard pie and genuinely cried. Every am-dram opening night in Essex, every showcase where casting agents glanced at me for eleven seconds, every two-line role in a pub theatre above a Wetherspoons.

She films it. On her phone. Vertically. With her thumb occasionally drifting into shot like some kind of flesh-coloured eclipse.

I have a hard drive folder of these videos and they are, without exception, unwatchable. You can hear a woman next to her unwriting a sandwich. You can hear her own breathing. At one point, during my big monologue in a production of The Seagull, the camera pans slowly away from me entirely to capture what I can only assume was a very interesting moth.

But she has them. All of them. Filed. Dated. Ready to show a barber, a dentist, or — God help me — a boyfriend.

The Pressure Nobody Warns You About

Here's the thing nobody tells you about having a parent in the audience: it's simultaneously the safest and most terrifying room you'll ever play.

Safe, because you can't truly fail. Whatever happens out there, there is one person for whom your performance is objectively the best thing in the world. I could trip over a lighting cable, deliver every line in the wrong order and set fire to the curtain, and she would still describe it to the bar staff afterwards as "basically a masterclass" — usually while I'm standing right there, dying.

Terrifying, for exactly the same reason. When the stakes are zero with someone, you notice how badly you want to be good anyway. Strangers' approval is nice, but it's currency. Her approval is oxygen. And so every time I spot her in row F — and I always spot her, because she does a little wave that could be seen from space — there's a flicker of something that feels like being eight again, waiting to be picked.

Her Notes Are Not for the Faint of Heart

Do not mistake attendance for softness. My mother's post-show notes are more rigorous than anything I got at drama school.

"The girl playing your sister was stronger than you tonight."

"You rushed the funny bit. The funny bit is why people came."

"That man in the front row didn't laugh and I didn't like his face."

She critiques my co-stars with the confidence of a woman who has never once read a script but has watched Casualty since 1993. She once told a director — to his face, at the interval, holding a white wine — that the sound design was "a bit much". I have never been more horrified or more proud.

And yet. When she says I was good, it lands differently. A review is an opinion. My mum saying "you made me forget you were my daughter for a bit" is a verdict from the only critic whose verdict I actually care about.

The Low-Key Grief of an Empty Seat

Last year I did a run where she couldn't make it — a knee thing, nothing dramatic. Sold-out house, lovely audiences, best notices I've had in years.

And every single night, at the half-hour call, I felt a little dip in my chest. Row F was empty. Nobody was waving. Nobody was breathing audibly into a phone. It should have been a relief. It mostly just felt like performing into a slightly colder room.

I don't know what to do with that, other than say it out loud. There's a version of this industry that tells you to be ruthless, self-made, unencumbered. And then there's the truth, which is that most of us got here because one person drove us to rehearsals in the rain, sat through things that were genuinely not very good, and clapped anyway.

So this is a thank you, I suppose. To the mums, the dads, the nan who came to everything until she couldn't. The ones holding the wobbly vertical videos. The thumb in the frame is not a flaw.

It's proof someone was there.