I’m somewhat reluctant to contribute to the neverending story of the wellbeing of performance criticism, as talking about talking about live performance seems a peculiarly niche thing to do at any time, least of all when we’re about to start bombing the same country for the third time in my lifetime. But a few days ago a good friend of mine said that criticism is all terrible these days, and then some other people disagreed and then someone else wrote very articulately about how they were both right, with reference to the structural problems with the conventional reviewing formula, particularly in the broadsheet media. All of which got me thinking a bit about the responsibility artists might have for the quality of the critical landscape they make their work in.
Yes, we can blame particular reviewers for their lack of quality or perhaps their lack of empathy. And we can blame newspapers for ransoming off the space to think about art and culture in their last deckchair-rearranging attempts at keeping their sinking business models afloat. And we can blame capitalism for the insidious power it has to denature the way we think about and interact with beautiful things. But should we as artists bear some responsibility for acquiescing too easily to these forces? Is a helplessness that leads too often to petulance really the best we can contribute to the attempts by some brilliant writers to transform the critical culture in this country? Are we sometimes at fault for slagging off the worst conventions of theatre criticism with one hand, whilst continuing to participate in the reproduction of those exact same conventions when it suits us? I am asking myself these questions as much as I am asking anyone who has bothered to read this far down the page.
For example, perhaps one simple thing we could all do, is to stop printing uncontextualised star-ratings on the front of flyers and posters. Star ratings are the very worst – nuance’s kryptonite – tiny nuggets of sadness harvested in the darkest heart of consumer capitalism and sent to cling grimly to the surface of art like old shopping bags floating down a river. Yet there they are, whole constellations of them scattered across the front of every piece of publicity – each one a quiet concession to a version of our work, and a relationship to an audience, that I think most people I know would barely recognise. But equally I know the reason they’re there is because we want people to come and see our stuff, we perhaps even need them to come, and its hard enough to get people to give up an evening and money they barely have to come and see some art they know little about without sacrificing one of the best means you have of gaining their curiosity. In doing so however we’re helping to perpetuate a thinness to the way in which people can engage with our work, and the means they have of navigating their way through it. To an extent, the very stars that we use to attract people are actually perhaps limiting the number of people who will engage with our work and the ways that they have of engaging with it. It’s a vicious circle, but the point is, we are part of that circle, not simply it’s victims.
The other immediate thing that artists could do to help change the critical culture in this country is to actually actively contribute to that critical culture, by which I mean artists could and should be writing more about each other’s work. There is no more imaginative, more positive and more practical contribution that artists could be making to changing the way we think about criticism. Some of the most exciting, thoughtful responses to work I’ve seen in the last few years have been by artists. People redefining the nature of the relationship between event and response or artist and critic, such as in Harun Morrison’s articulate and unselfconscious responses to the work in his own festival, or artists finding compelling new vocabularies for writing about performance, such as James Stenhouse’s pseudonymous review of Laura Dannequin’s Hardy Animal. I want to challenge artists to find their own way of writing about live performance, ways that challenge who we think has a right to speak and how and when. We could learn a lot from brilliant writers like Megan Vaughan about how unlike a review a review can look. We should see their work as a thrilling challenge to find our own different, more appropriate ways of saying what we want to say, and the less it looks like a review perhaps the better, the more so to contribute to a burgeoning, widening, polyphony of critical voices that are helping redefine the ways we have to think about the work we see and the work we make.
There are plenty of reasons to feel frustrated with criticism in this country, and certainly we should celebrate the great voices like Lyn Gardner who do so much within a difficult system, as well as championing writers like Megan and Maddy Costa and Catherine Love who are contributing so much to finding alternatives to that system. But I want to believe that artists themselves can play a larger part in that re-organising process, both by making our own imaginative critical contributions and being more diligent at refusing to participate in the shittiest parts of the current orthodoxy.
Ephemerous 
Food for thought.
I think, even though you mention it as an aside, you hit the nail on the head when you reference the long slow decline of the printed press. The conventional model of theatre criticism (or indeed any arts criticism) is rooted in the printed press and inescapably in the nineteenth century that spawned the newspaper explosion. It was also the age where the passivity of the theatre audience and the reverence for the stage action was at its most polarised: whether in the fantasies of Wagner’s gods and monsters or in the all too human realities of Chekhov, they demanded the silent subservience of their audiences to such an extent that they erected the fourth wall to prevent contamination between the stage and its observers.
The Charon negotiating this Styx between audience and stage was the (often self-appointed) expert in the field, the Critic. There are few critics that ever reach the fame or reputation as the artists upon whose work they pronounce judgement and, among those that do and who are remembered long after they have shuffled off, it is interesting that those who are now largely considered to have been on the wrong side of the argument remain as noteworthy as those luminaries who articulately heralded the arrival of some New Art or other. The great late nineteenth century critic Eduard Hanslick is now primarily known for his rejection of what would have been regarded as the progressive music of the time: Tchaikovsky, Liszt and, most memorably, Wagner.
What does this say about the traditionally critic? Is the critic’s role transitory or for all time? Is the critic a contemporary means for providing what will later become an historical context or simply a tool for the industry to get bums on seats (providing, of course, that they say nice things)? Maybe it is the tension between these two things that creates the spice – when a critic writes a good review (good, that is, from the theatre’s point of view) then there is a symbiotic relationship between the artistic and critical creatures; when the response is disdainful of the work then the critic is dismissed as a parasite sucking the blood from the wholesome body of the creator.
Thus it ever was – but almost everything has changed since then. The growth of universal education that began in the nineteenth century has eroded the hallowed position of the critic, which lacks the perceived nobility of the professions and stands only a little removed from the ambiguous murk of that most suspected of occupations… journalism. So much so that free-thinking audience members might dismiss the pronouncements of critics as being “just the opinion” of one person which has both a kernel of truth in it whilst being at the same time rather unfair and simplistic.
This erosion has been further compounded by the rise of the internet and the commensurate decline in the printed press that sustained the critics – fewer people read the responses of the great Patrician critics of the broadsheets and the picture is clouded by the clamour of a thousand bloggers. Such is the ease with which an opinion may be offered on the web (this very post I am typing being a case in point – who the hell am I, after all?) that inevitably there is considerable variation in the quality and nuance that emanates from our computer screens. For every Adorno there are a hundred penny dreadfuls.
It is not just the privileged pedestal of the critic that is under threat, however: the stage is being invaded by the audience and the fourth wall has long since been torn down. We Are All Artists Now, it seems, and the consensus that all people have some degree or other of creative expression to offer and capability of critical response has been embraced on the progressive fringes where interactivity is all the rage. A passive audience would be anathema in the variations of theatrical experience offered by the likes of Punchdrunk and Coney, and the intimate exchanges facilitated by the late Adrian Howells. In the context of this type of experience, do the terms ‘artist’, ‘audience’, ‘theatre’ and ‘stage’ even have any meaning any more?
Into this New World of creative possibilities, and in a new media landscape that is unrecognisable from that which existed a generation ago, where does our poor old nineteenth century critic find himself (for of course it would always have been a ‘him’ – something else that has mercifully changed since Victoria reigned over us)?
Change in theatre is as much as a fait accompli as is change in society and the two have a symbiotic relationship just as much as does artist and audience, theatre and critic. The old-fashioned model that sustains the traditional theatre critic is a snake swallowing its own tail, which is precisely why it is held hostage to the crass insignia of the star-ratings system. For many of the same reasons the contemporary visual arts scene is dictated by a handful of wealthy art collectors in which the monetary value of an unmade bed is given as much sway as its aesthetic and intellectual value.
It is not that a new model needs to be found – that is not the way it works – the new model has for years been emerging naturally out of the social, technological and artistic change that demanded it; but we are naturally resistant to change, assuming that we have even recognised that it is taking place.
Our multimedia society lends itself not to a designated expert telling us whether the piece of theatre we have just witnessed was worthy or not, but to a plurality of opinion of which we should not be afraid. We live now in the age of User Generated Content in which a variety of voices is a virtue, whether they are expressed by a group of people in a room such as in Costa and Orr’s Dialogue events, in online reviews, in comments beneath video and image content, in blog posts and its responses, and even, occasionally, in print. It’s a Cake and East It scenario in which all opinions are valid yet in which the articulate, the nuanced and the insightful will always be recognised – and all the more for coming from within an inclusive debate rather than having been handed down by a man in a top hat with a fountain pen.