My goodness... Look at their grass!

The last three weeks have been, to say the least, hectic. Consequently, I have been only sporadically updating Arts Journalist, much to furious emails.

The disgrace of this is that I have been flat out when there has been a fantastic debate raging between London, New York and Melbourne about the role of critics. It has been a fantastic tussle, and as you all probably know, started when Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre gave critics a spray in The Times calling them 'dead white males'.

It appears that he was quite aggrieved at the state of criticism in the UK, particularly by, you guessed it, older white men. In particular, he felt that they were being a disservice to the industry particularly towards female directors.

This little article took off like Errol Flynn, flew smack into the side Michael Billington at the Guardian, which then ricocheted off Lyn Gardner also at the Guardian. The tremors spread through the net and the theatre blogs all jumped in the pond together with George Hunka in the US having a splash, swiftly followed by Andrew Field jumping in while Alison Croggon stood on the side clapping her hands in glee and egging them all on! Encore Magazine got amongst the fray as well and then David Eldgridge and finally the UK's Telegraph jumped in and sprayed a bit of water.

It has been marvellous. Then to top it all off, Michael Billington recalls a carpark encounter with Hytner, where they air their opinions once again.

On this side of the fence, I can only salivate at the mouth that these types of empassioned responses happen at all. This has got to be one of the most beautiful examples of how the Internet has pressed forward theatrical discussion, where blogs and opinion pieces blend together creating a symphonic debate that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

I am going to get parochial with Alison Croggon and point my bloggy finger at the Sydney Morning Herald and say, 'where are you?!' They are barely able to update their blog, which has now been gathering dust for two months now and the silence of the industry and the critics in Sydney has been deafening.

One could suggest that maybe mainstream criticism in Sydney is not a problem. That is certainly true in the sense that there is essentially only two newspapers that provide criticism and therefore it makes the debate null and void, but there are increasingly worrying things happening down at Darling Park, particularly online.

It now appears that the broadsheet Sydney Morning Herald is gradually doing less and less independent theatre and performance reviews while generally maintaining constant coverage of the institutional offerings with their larger budgets. What the Sydney Morning Herald online then does, to appear a lot more comprehensive than they actually are, is use the reviews of Jason Blake in the sister Sunday paper, The Sun Herald on their website. This is the equivalent of the Guardian using The Observer's reviews as their own.

No, the debate about gender and age in criticism hasn't even entered Sydney.

Is it any wonder?



Image: myopera.com