Today's the day I've set aside to upload reviews from the past couple of months. I will back date them as I go along. This is long overdue, highlighted by a couple of my Melbourne readers as well as the misinformed comment by 'Cerberus' (what is it with anonymous or pseudonym comments??).
Cerberus made me think quite a lot over the weekend when s/he left the comment;
Sometimes critics get it wrong, or at least don't reflect the opinion of the audience. Witness "Lying Cheating Bastard" at the Old Fitz, which received almost unanimous praise except from N Pickard. Yet his Fairfax masters declared it the box office success of Sydney in today's Herald. I saw it two nights ago, had to sit in the aisle because of the overflow crowd and was transported with delight along with the rest of the audience. Nice to see that a very good show is critic proof.
Aside from the fact that they didn't bother to read my review properly, the logic of Cerberus' argument is very interesting as a way to see some of the backward steps some of us have taken when dealing with reviews or reviewers. Sometimes I think many people think the art of criticism is objective. It isn't and never will be and is the double edged sword of the profession.
Criticism is subjective and critics can only ever hope to pen what they thought and what they felt on the night. Is it possible that a critic can 'get it wrong' in the first place?
Michael Billington famously admitted he got Sarah Kane 'wrong' when he started reviewing her work back in the 1990s.
I really like the fact that Cerberus thought the show at the Old Fitz was the best thing since sliced bread without a single fault, but s/he forgets that we saw the show on two separate nights in front of two different audiences with two different performances. The magic of theatre is it is never the same and I am more interested in knowing what it was about the show Cerberus liked so much.
But the saddest part of Cerberus' comment is that in a world where critics 'get it wrong' is a world desiring a uniformity of opinion. In a Cerberus world, all reviews would be the same and a difference of opinion wouldn't be seen as constructive or illustrative - they would be seen as just 'wrong'. It is a world that wants to place the critic against the theatre practitioner.
I honestly thought we'd moved on from this type of argument - but apparently not.
A couple of months ago Guerilla Semiotics had an interesting post regarding the nature of theatre reviewing. In the post, Jana asserted that "as anyone involved in a creative practice can attest, constructive criticism is an act of extreme generosity. To receive honest, informed and in-depth feedback is invaluable if one is to grow as a practitioner of absolutely anything - and it often requires knowledge of the person, the art form, the conditions of production."
Jana, who is of a Croatian background, has a very similar point of view to me (who studied theatre directing in another ex-Yugoslavian country, Slovenia) on the role of critic. She explains that in these countries, 'critics were not seen as the enemy, or as a superfluous part of the sector, but a necessary link between an art form and an audience, both an arbiter of taste and an interpreter.'
In Slovenia the critic is theatre practitioner is playwright is director is actor. Can you imagine that happening in Australia?
When considering the nature of theatre reviewing, it's important to discern between the two very different modes of reviewing in Australia - the online discussion and opinion piece with the published review in a newspaper or magazine.
In a printed review there is a finite amount of space within the confines of an editorial policy and is subject to sub-editing. The fortune of it is you are writing to an audience vastly larger than an industry specific blog and you quickly learn the art of being concise.
In the online forum you can write a review of between 300-1000 words with the freedom of unlimited space which can be published within the bounds of your own self-censorship. But its written for a more niche reader who will have a knowledge and a more specific interest in the art form.
Both forms share the one intrinsic benefit - they add to the sharing of ideas and to the debate about what our artists and cultural industries are presenting within our community and our society.
But how should a critic write a review in a mainstream publication? Does a critic have a responsibility to the industry? To the artist? To the reader? Or does the critic have a responsibility just to themselves to publish simply what they think?
Jana's article makes the very important point that if critics portray a world "in which everything is great, and everyone wonderful [it] lets the audience down in a very serious way. The readers stop paying attention to unreliable information."
The film industry recently went through this debate when they were targeted as a collective for being too positive about locally made content against their more critical judgement of foreign films.
But as she also says, a lot criticism in Australia (whether positive or negative) attracts (most particularly on blogs where there is the ability to comment) its fair share of anonymous or pseudonym bile. Ostensibly this flows from the one essential truth about criticism - it can only ever be subjective.
As I upload my reviews, bring on the constructive debate because I am really interested in what anyone thinks about shows and where our views diverge or converge. But leave the critic v theatre industry argument where it belongs - otherwise it all gets very boring.
