Theatre Criticism: Waving or Drowning?

By JBR

Mark Shenton's blog can usually be relied upon to get me thinking. This week he returned to a subject close to his heart: the role of the theatre critic. This isn't a new subject for Mark, nor for Emily or myself; I've been asked to write about the role of critics for just about every theatre publication I've ever written for and Emily's essay on the future of theatre criticism was published in the most recent issue of Fourthwall Magazine. It's a debate that goes round and round and back and forth (mostly between the critics themselves as it is them the issue effects most directly). But, my fear is that Mark is right - theatre criticism is, in many ways, dead. It is also more alive and more vibrant than ever before. The expression "everyone's a critic" has never seemed more appropriate.

As my colleague Emily Hardy argues here, the trouble is not a lack of people willing to offer an opinion but the paucity of decent, intelligent writing about theatre...

"In one respect, the immediate, wide-spread accessibility of a review has facilitated increased readership, but rapid turn-around and 'free-for-all' authorship means that the quality of criticism, at one time an art form in itself, is suffering [...] The internet is everything and nothing because it has no centralised governance. What is fact without validation? Opportunistic bloggers, tweeters, and rapid-response reviewers, have filled the information vacuum created by the impartial internet, and whilst these unpaid, unqualified, unknowledgable writers slather the web with their opinions, informative, measured and witty criticism slips into the archives of yet another lost art form. Web reviewers, writing to varying degrees of purpose or proliferation have spawned a culture of speed rather than that of considered opinion, and this has resulted in wide-spread unemployment." (Emily Hardy, The Future of Theatre Criticism. Click to read more)

Bloggers have killed theatre criticism, and probably rightly so. The idea that I need, that anyone needs, a white, middle-class, middle-aged male (I'm aware I'm using broad brush strokes here, but allow me to posit, for the sake of this blog at least, that in this instance, the majority is the norm) to tell me what I should or shouldn't like is a form of cultural racism that now speaks more to the industry of theatre than it does to the artistry. Where once I allowed, from sheer lack of alternative, the editorial limitations of my favourite newspaper to define my taste and preferences, now I have, at my fingertips, the opinions of hundreds, if not thousands, of witty, clever, opinionated people and frankly, in our increasingly harried society, a well-crafted 140 characters can carry far more weight than a theatre review that is little more than a plot precis and a few lines of opinion. Everyone's a critic. It's a shame that everyone isn't an expert.

So actually, bloggers haven't killed theatre criticism at all. It's the newspapers who have killed criticism with their word counts, formats and restrictions. It's the PR companies who have killed theatre criticism by refusing to accept that the opinions of a small handful of people matter much. It's theatre critics themselves who have killed theatre criticism with their poorly written, rushed and ill-considered reviews. Not all, but some. Not by any means every critic, but some. You only need to look at the pages of the national papers to realise that much of what now passes for criticism is as useful as wiping your arse with a cloud. Andy Nyman in The Golden Rules of Acting wrote "The five most useless things in the world? The Pope's balls, a nun's tits and a good review in The Stage" but, in reality, he could have been talking about almost any national newspaper.

I like Lyn Gardner and Matt Trueman - in much the same way as I used to adore Roger Ebert. If Ebert liked a film, I liked it. Our tastes were similar and I admired his range tremendously. If Gardner or Trueman like a show, chances are I'll like it. Not because I'm a sheep, but because I have learned, over the years, that we have similar taste. I like Shenton's taste too, although we don't always agree. While I admired the artistry and production of Peter Huntley's haunting Floyd Collins at Southwark Playhouse a few years ago, I would certainly have fallen far short of calling it, as Shenton did, the greatest musical on the Fringe. Similarly, the year I was an Olivier judge, my preference for Best Musical that year was for Parade, rather than the eventual winner, Hairspray. My taste. My opinion - and after decades of studying theatre and working in the industry in all areas, I think I'm entitled to give it. It's usually considered, usually truthful, usually honest and often lands me in hot water. But it's just my opinion, I don't get paid for it, and much as I'd like to, I'm not convinced that I ought to, or that anyone ought to. I certainly don't think anyone should be paid for a plot summary and a few thoughts knocked up on the tube on the way home and posted online before the audience have even left the building.

I'm as sad as anyone is that national newspapers are scaling down their arts coverage. I'm devastated at the way Shenton and Libby Purves have been treated by their employers and the ramifications that this has on the industry. But the death of theatre criticism isn't recent. It happened years ago, when we failed to acknowledge that criticism is in itself an art, that the review is in itself an art form. So now I rarely read reviews for the artistry of the writer, I read them solely for their opinion of the art. And in a world where even the national critics are just one voice among the noise screaming their opinion, for a more considered, critical opinion, I'll be opening my laptop, and not a newspaper.

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