I don’t know about you, but I’ve been having withdrawal symptoms from my self-imposed “blogging leave” of the last week. And being entirely away from the theatre, too, for a full week has been a bit surreal (yes, life - and the theatre - does go on without me!). But I’ve also been discovering how very tiring it is to do so very little! During my week in Gran Canaria I wrote a bit every day, and of course checked the web daily for breaking news, at least of the theatrical variety - but otherwise I managed to turn a darker shade of pale as I spent a lot of time in a cooling pool-side Jacuzzi, treating myself to afternoon ice cream sundaes and late evening meals and not doing a whole lot else.
But if I’ve been away from London theatre and my blog, it’s been fascinating to catch up, vicariously, with the annual theatrical marathon of New York Times chief critic Ben Brantley, who is in London for a month and filing a daily blog of his own about what he sees (and sometimes, who he sees - Ralph Fiennes was just down the row from him at Major Barbara at the National - and even what he eats: he has “bad and restless dreams” after seeing Anthony Neilson’s Relocated, adding, “and I don’t think it was just from eating a comforting slab of Fortnum and Mason treacle fudge”).
This isn’t the first year that Brantley has been blogging from London - he did it last year, too.
And he’s not the only New York Times critic to be called upon to do so lately: Alistair Macaulay, chief dance critic of the paper and my former theatre critic colleague on the FT, was back home in London for a week in March and was also filing a daily blog from here, too. But what’s also been interesting to observe, apart from the immediacy of a daily bulletin as opposed to the few round-ups Brantley used to write in the paper, is the difference in tone that the blog seems to engender: it’s both more informal and personal than his regular prose. If you read a critic long enough, you get to know their personal theatrical tastes and (sometimes) proclivities; but it’s taken a blog to find out his taste for treacle fudge.
And while I know that I have been revealing my own quirks and opinions here for on August 3 next month will be two years - my, how time has flown! - it is interesting to watch other professional critics catching on, too, to the blogosphere. J. Kelly Nestruck - who used to write the Guardian theatre’s blog about blogs but went home to his native Canada in February to become theatre critic of Toronto’s Globe and Mail - has just launched his own blog on the paper’s website to complement the review copy he files for the paper. And, as I do regularly here, he used it yesterday to compare and contrast his own review of a Stratford Shaw Festival production of A Little Night Music with those of his colleagues.
Over here in London, other critics have been slow to adopt - or adapt to — the blogosphere, though Lyn Gardner is a frequent contributor of some of the best entries on The Guardian theatre blog, where Michael Billington also checks in there occasionally, alongside the many other freelance voices that are heard there - including, from time to time, yours truly. Elsewhere, Michael Coveney files a regular blog on Whatsonstage, and on Theatrevoice.com, the invaluable archive of theatre interviews and critical round-ups, a range of critics are to be found blogging regularly - a thoughtful recent entry by Sam Marlowe of The Times on critical responses to Fat Pig even drew a response from cast member Robert Webb!
Leave a comment