How close should a critic get to the process of the theatre and its practitioners? Is our job confined to what happens on the stage after the curtain goes up and stops when the curtain comes down again?
I, in common with many of my colleagues, don’t just write reviews but also regularly write interview and theatre programme features as well, and I also host discussions – either publicly, as in National Theatre platforms or other post-show talks, or privately, such as the one I do every summer with a group of American theatre visitors for whom I host a daily seminar of the play they’ve seen the night before, and then have the director, writer or a cast member from the production in to talk to the group afterwards.
So I get to look beneath the bonnet, or rather behind the stage or pass door, of what happens in the theatre.
Though some may think that the personal relationships that invariably evolve out of this might make me less objective about them, I hope that it gives me a greater understanding of how it all works that allows me to take a far wider view.
I often address the specifics of how the reviewing process works in this blog, and I interestingly discovered that actors read it, too: hosting a couple of post-show discussions at the National this week for Present Laughter, I found out that they didn’t know about the fact that I, and many of my colleagues, had snuck in (with the theatre’s permission, I hasten to add) a night earlier than the official press night, until they saw it here.
Last night I was taken by surprise when, for the first time, someone in the audience asked me a question, too, rather than of the actors: how did I approach reviewing a play like this that I’ve probably seen several times before? There’s certainly a certain mystique, at least in the public’s eyes, to how we work, and its good to be able to start to break it down.
But actors, too, are inevitably wary of us – both of the actors last night denied reading their reviews. And when I interviewed Mel Smith a couple of weeks ago, he turned interviewer at one point to ask me: “I once saw Charles Spencer talking to Michael Billington, but you don’t tend to hang around in great big bunches. Can I ask you something? Do you ever give each other a hint of what you thought about it, or not?” I am discovering that it’s helpful for both sides to know more about how the other operates.
Wot's stradling?
How close to associate with those involved with productions is a tricky thing, even down at the lower end of the theatrical/reviewer spectrum that we operate at. We've certainly turned down a number of drinks invites over the last year or so in line with our objective of keeping on the 'outside looking in'. I do apreciate that insider knowledge can be beneficial, but for someone doing this as a bit of fun it's just so much easier to avoid risking personalities compromising objectivity.
And as for actors not reading their reviews... that may be the case with the big names on the London stage but in smaller regional/fringe/community theatre the stats we recieve on the searches that bring people to read our thoughts on shows (and how they e-mail them around afterwards) would suggest that many do pay attention to the comments - even of humble bloggers. Not to mention the ones who then add the reviews to their own personal websites.
Stradling? It's a young violin, isn't it?