A critical discussion….

In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon famously hurl insults at each other: “Ceremonious ape!” “Punctilious pig!” “Moron!” “Vermin!” “Abortion” “Morpion!” Sewer-Rat!” “Curate!” “Cretin!” And then Estragon delivers the knock-out blow (Beckett’s stage instructions even go so far as to say that he says it “with finality”) – “Crritic!”

And in Sondheim and Furth’s musical Merrily We Roll Along (currently being revived at Derby Playhouse) that is set amongst showbiz folk, there’s an exchange at a party where one character is behaving drunkenly to the distress of the host, and one of the other guests asks another, “Isn’t she somebody?”. The reply says it all: “No, she’s a critic!”

These are neat reminders of the contempt some creative types hold my profession in. But it’s not, fortunately, universal – as Anthony Neilson said to me in correspondence last week, “I find it woeful that there is such an adversarial relationship between critics and practitioners, especially when we are bound by our love for an already besieged medium.”

We may be on different sides of the footlights, but we have a common wish: to produce and see good theatre, respectively. Of course, the tension in the relationship between us comes because we may have different ideas about what that constitutes. But one of the points of this blog – which I don’t have space to articulate in my other public outlets – is to at least get a conversation going between us. That’s also, incidentally, the point of Theatrevoice, an internet conversational outlet about the theatre, which initially set out to get critics talking to each other, with the conversations being recorded so that the public could download them, or listen online. As it has evolved, the site now records conversations with practitioners as well; and the critical forums that David Benedict and I alternately host there now take a wider v view, too. Last week I hosted a “Fringe Focus” session, looking at the place of the fringe, and critics Lyn Gardner of The Guardian and Kieron Quirke of the Standard, as well as Sofie Mason of the website offwestend.com that dedicates itself to promoting the fringe, we were joined by BAC’s David Jubb.

The theatrical conversation shouldn’t, of course, be a closed shop between critics and practitioners, though; there’s an even bigger body we are both seeking to address, and need to bring into the conversation: namely the public of which we are all a part. And we ignore them at our peril. In one of my blog entries last week in which I wrote of Broadway producer Scott Rudin taking on the might of the New York Times with regard to their posting of public “user” reviews, one regular reader of this blog replied here, “Whilst I enjoy your blog very much I am disheartened that you have taken another opportunity to sneer at amateur critics. What is it exactly that makes your opinion any more truthful or relevant than theirs? Is it that you see a lot of theatre each week so you can automatically tell the good from bad? Well, as you like to point out there is often a lot of disagreement between newspaper critics themselves, so frequency of visit does not produce a reliable gauge of quality. So why are the views of the professional critics considered by you to be more incisive than the common man that goes to the theatre only for the love of the experience? You pointed out recently that not only did many of the critics go to Oxbridge universities but also many of them were in the same college as you? Is it this that marks their card as being a cut above the rest? Am I getting closer to the truth now, that class is the key to the respect to which you afford opinion?”

It was not, of course, my intention to ‘sneer’ at amateur critics — in fact, I don’t believe I did! It was actually Rudin’s words, not mine, to refer to them as “faceless amateurs whose only qualification to review a play is that they bought a ticket and have access to a computer.”

But that does get to the heart of the matter: not that I (or my colleagues) are “uniquely” qualified to offer our comments and commentary, more than anyone else — we are ALL critics, whenever we offer an opinion — but the difference is that we get paid for ours. Its not a question of class, but of pedigree: our reviews may be as wrong, annoying, or badly written as anyone else’s, and an amateur review may by contrast be far more “on the button” than our reviews, but because someone is actually prepared to pay us to write our reviews — and readers are prepared to pay to read them (at least if they buy a paper, that is, and don’t get them free online!), means that they literally have a “value”.

But what is that exchange of money buying, as opposed to the “free” reader reviews? I may be wrong about this, too, but I think the two most important qualities of a critic are passion and knowledge. When a palpable love and enthusiasm for the form is combined with the experience of seeing far more than most people, some (but not all!) critics earn a bit of “authority”, if not always-universal admiration. Again, this doesn’t prevent us from being wrong — or contradictory with each other (once again, last weekend saw the Sunday Telegraph’s Tim Walker marching out of step with the rest of the crowd – awarding a four star rave to the RSC’s new Macbeth at Stratford-upon-Avon, which he called “exceptionally compelling”—while in the Sunday Times, John Peter weighed in with a one-star pan, calling it “one of the worst productions of this disaster-prone play I’ve seen”).

But at least what we write has some kind of context and background. The other key difference to public reviews that can be posted anonymously, or under pseudonyms, is that we have our names attached to the reviews. Readers may disagree with us — I regularly disagree with Tim Walker, for instance — but at least I know where he is coming from, and realise that is likely to happen. But except in a few cases where discussion board users are so regular that they acquire their own identities, we don’t know who they are, or have built up a relationship with them, so we don’t know where they are coming from.