Andrew Haydon at the Guardian theatre blog raises some interesting questions about the purpose of theatre reviews – drawing a tentative distinction between reviews which judge whether a performance is a success or failure, and reviews which offer a kind of non-partisan analysis.
You could argue that Haydon is talking about almost entirely different modes of writing – produced over different time-scales, subjected to different editorial processes and intended for different audiences for different purposes. We could see two separate genres, one for a mass audience with an explicit and open implication that the review will impact ticket sales, one for a more specific, academic audience with the implication that the review will place the performance in a critical landscape.
However, like all good and seemingly tidy binary systems, the real problems emerge with reviews that don’t fall neatly into either category: neither 3 out of 5, or footnoted to the hilt. In fact, that kind of oppositional thinking is a mistake: there’s no reason why reviews can’t offer an aesthetic judgement and place that judgement in some kind of critical landscape. The question isn’t whether a synthesis is possible, but what it might look like.
While I don’t want to suggest that there’s a singular “right” way to review theatre, I would argue that there’s a core quality of the broader genre of reviewing which suggests how some kind of balance should be ordered.
A theatre review is, at its core, a witness account of a live event. As such, it’s a form of writing that reflects (or should reflect) the unique kind of shared experience built between a group of people in a single time and space. It understands that even within the stringent restraints of script and rehearsal, each performance remains a unique event.
You might think, then, that some of the conventions of mainstream (newspaper) reviewing are curiously perverse: the rush to print a first night review which appears in the early edition of a paper in the following day, an account of a singular performance which is then supposed to stand in for all other performances of that play. The account of a singular event is presumed to be an adequate prediction of the experience of all other performances.
However, the recognition of a live and unique experience of performance persists in the way in which reviews are constructed – accounts of audience reaction, and more intangible descriptions of mood and atmosphere. This concern for theatre as live event is also apparent in most – if not the overwhelming majority – of critical writing in theatre studies: journal after journal concerned with theatre in practice, plays in production and performance rather than plays merely as literary artefacts.
Consequently, the question isn’t whether or not to pass judgment or offer interpretation but if and when those kinds of criticism actually relate to the experience of theatre as live event. And the remaining issues of genre (dictated by audience and publisher) will probably take care of themselves anyway.
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