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The Creative and the CriticDateline: 29th August, 1999 Having spent the last three weeks watching, reviewing shows at the Edinburgh Fringe and putting those reviews online, I thought it might be timely to have another look at the vexed question of the value of reviews and the relationship between the critic and the creative. In fact, a number of things that have happened or been said over the last few weeks brought the idea to my mind. The main one, of course, is the fairly frequent discrepancies between what reviewers have said about certain shows. Take The Kaos Importance of Being Earnest, for instance: I gave it three stars and commented, "Clowning, I'm afraid, changes Wilde's needle into a sledgehammer," whilst The Stage thought it was great. In similar vein, I was talking to Shakespeare 4 Kidz director Julian Chenery about a day of debate on Shakespeare at the Fringe Club (which I had hoped to attend but was unable to), and he mentioned that theatre critic Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph had said that if he were to see their Romeo and Juliet (which he did not intend to do), he would attack it. I didn't see it - that was the day when their Romeo was taken into hospital - but The Stage was enthusiastic. Personal prejudice! I didn't see any need to try to turn Earnest from a comedy of manners into a farce. Spencer does not like the idea of anyone simplifying Shakespeare's work. Should we allow our prejudices to influence what we write? I don't see how we can avoid it, unless we try to be strictly objective and talk about the plot, the performance and the audience reaction. Reactions to Berkoff's East were similarly different, ranging from the dismissive (totally out of date) through the condemnatory ("cod" poetry) to the enthusiastic. And as for the show which was, for me, the "turkey" of the Fringe, Macbeth 2000, critics in the US seem to have taken a completely different view. In a 1997 article entitled A Sow with Five Legs, I quoted the following from James Agate: Dramatic criticism has three functions. The first is to let the world know what the previous night's play has been about. There's no reason why a report of this kind should not be written by the same man who describes how in the afternoon he saw a man knocked down in Oxford Street. The second function is to tell the public whether the new play is good, bad or indifferent. This means that the critic must know his job. That is if you hold with my dictionary, which defines criticism as "The art of judging with knowledge and propriety of the beauty and faults of art". The third function is to report the theatre in terms of the art of writing. That, however, raises more questions than it answers: telling the public whether the new play is good, bad or indifferent implies that there is some objective standard by which plays can be judged. To a limited extent that is the case: if it's so constructed that it doesn't make sense, then it's a bad play. On the other hand, the history of art is littered with critics who have condemned work which later generations have regarded as masterpieces. We have only to look at the reaction of the critics of his day to Keats, or of many eighteenth century critics to Shakespeare to recognise that! The critic can say "This is a badly constructed play." He can also say, "The actors perform this play badly", or "The direction is confusing", or "The lighting is poor", but can he say, "This is a bad play", or "This is a bad interpretation of the play"? I think he can, so long as his readers recognise that what he is saying is his opinion and not a fact. And the reader had also better take care with comments such as, "This is a badly constructed play". After all, any Shakespeare play is bad according to the so-called Aristotelian rules of the unity of place, time and action! Is, then, the critic superfluous? Not at all! We simply have to make allowances. In a situation like the Edinburgh Fringe, critics are almost essential. Just the evening before I wrote this, I read a posting in rec.arts.theatre.plays in which the writer asked if anyone else had been to the Fringe and agreed with him that the standard is lower this year than in previous years. He'd only seen about half a dozen plays which he felt were worthwhile, and they, he added, would not have been five star plays in other festivals. I'd only seen one of the plays he instanced as the best he'd seen (Bare, to which I'd given four stars), but I'd felt exactly the opposite, that standards were higher this year! Out of the 600-odd shows, he'd chosen to see a number which were, at best, just good, whilst I'd managed to choose about the same number, the majority of which were good or better. So what is the poor audience member to do to get value for money? Rely on the critics, of course! We may not be perfect, but at least we provide a starting point and enable the ordinary punter to make an informed choice and so minimise the chance of wasting his money. Articles Indices: |
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