Theatre critics are opinionated – that’s our job. And we don’t always agree – in fact, that’s one of the pleasures of a media landscape in which there are still enough outlets for there to be as many opinions as there are places available to express them. But there’s also a unique tension when members of the same paper go head-to-head to confront each other, and there’s a remarkable debate going on at the Guardian blog. It opened on Monday with Michael Billington – the paper’s long-serving chief drama critic – posing the question ‘Who Needs Reviews?’ and adopting a defensive position that suggested that he welcomed blogs, but not as a replacement of professional theatre reviewing, while Billington’s deputy Lyn Gardner replied the next day that “the blogosphere has breathed new life into the dying art of reviewing.”
While Michael was intent to defend a job that looks increasingly under threat, Lyn was therefore welcoming the opportunities that have been lately been opened up as a result of the blogosphere; but their very public divergence of opinion – on a blog, moreover — suggests that Lyn has thrown down the gauntlet as another challenge to his position. Who needs blogs to threaten your job when your deputy threatens it for you?
Though the blogosphere has led to a democratisation of the way theatre opinion can be expressed, there’s no such democracy to the world of the theatre critic, which is still hierarchically structured. The very fact that The Guardian, Telegraph and Times still employ a regular deputy to their chief critic, instead of buying in the occasional freelance (as the Independent now seems to do), is a sign that those papers still treat the theatre seriously; but deputies can suffer from being the constant underdog. The lead critic will usually keep the opening night diary, and deputise only those things they don’t want to cover, sometimes at the last minute; and the deputies of each of those papers otherwise carve out their own niches as purveyors of the regions and the fringe the rest of the time. Deputies also fight the ever-increasing pressure on space – the Evening Standard, who have two deputy theatre critics, sometimes don’t even run the reviews they commission from them.
No wonder a deputy like Lyn welcomes the new opportunities of the blogosphere, where all opinions are equally welcomed – and public dialogues can take place with the readers, too. The landscape of reviewing is definitely changing and evolving, and it may be that yet more radical interventions need to be made. The FT took a major step in breaking down the hierarchical structure of their theatre review desk by appointing Alastair Macaulay’s two deputies, Ian Shuttleworth and Sarah Hemming, to share the number one slot when Alastair departed for the New York Times.
But if nothing else, the blogosphere (as this particular debate has proved) can address the problems and also be part of the solution. Criticism, in whichever form it takes, is never the last word on a piece of art, but only the beginning of a dialogue between practitioners, consumers and commentators; and the blogs that are addressing how we work are now beginning to expand that conversation, too, even further.
