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.
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