I have just been sent a series of cuttings on theatre criticism by a friend, and in one of them the writer declares, “The biggest single obstacle to adequate dramatic criticism today is lack of space. Clement Scott had a column and a half at his disposal after an important first night. Now the allocation is one of two paragraphs or a weekly column to be shared among three or four plays. Under such conditions the dignity of dramatic criticism is difficult to sustain.”
No, this wasn’t written recently, but over 60 years ago, by someone called John W. Collier. So nothing has changed - and yet everything has changed. On the one hand, I am constantly fighting for space in my print outlets - sometimes I have as few as 110-120 words for a careful dissection of a major opening in, say, the London Paper or the American magazine Entertainment Weekly, but then the job becomes about making every one of them count; and even the weekly round-up I do for the Sunday Express often means cramming four or five shows into just 500 words.
On the other hand, I am always grateful that the theatre is covered at all in each of these places.
While film, television and celebrity - the staple for arts coverage in entertainment magazines and tabloid papers nowadays - are national and international phenomena, theatre is confined to the local venue it take in, however wide its reach might subsequently go. (I was reminded in a press release yesterday for the London production of The Phantom of the Opera, for instance, that the show has grossed over £1.7 billion to date worldwide - higher than any other film or stage play in history, including Titanic, ET and Star Wars).
Yet there is also now a depth and breadth of coverage possible today than ever before. I may have strictly limited word counts in the print media, but there are no such limits for instance on this blog. I may write as much as I have inclination and inspiration for. And it’s been fascinating to watch the exponential growth of the coverage of the Edinburgh Fringe thanks to the web: The Guardian, in particular, has done a sterling job this year, saturating their website with more reviews, blogs, podcasts and video than it is possible to keep track of. Next year, I may not bother going to Edinburgh; I’ll just stay home and live it vicariously through the Guardian’s coverage, only a tiny proportion of which makes it into the paper itself.
But it can also be too much of a good thing. Just as some people tell me how surprised they are at my ability to keep this blog going at the pace (and length) I typically do, I am equally amazed that so many people actually read it. Where’s the time to keep track of it all - let alone act on it? We all need a bit of time for reflection, as well as progression; and in the welter of news, views and reviews that come hurtling at us from every direction, there seems to be more of it than ever before, even as I paradoxically seem to be complaining that I’m personally sometimes starved for space.
Arts journalists may be feeling beleaguered in the new cost and space cutting environments of our traditional outlets; but there are new opportunities being created elsewhere all the time. The trick, of course, is to keep getting paid for it. And sometimes, of course, we don’t need more - we just need better. And that’s another instructive lesson from the Edinburgh experience: there may be saturation coverage, but in that minefield of opinions, it can be become impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.
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