Tomorrow I’ll post a full examen on the first two weeks of If Theatre’s The Cove, an ambitious presentation of eight short works written by Daniel Keene, directed by Matt Scholten, performed over four weeks, one premier and one revival each week .
This weekend closes out week two. There are still four plays left in the season. So check it out. Why? For your health, perhaps. The Cove’s effect is almost, in a pathological sense, inoculative: an immediate, short, sharp pain (the performance itself), followed by a period of unease or nausea (the post-show absorption), a treatment which might, in the long run, be good for you.
This inoculation metaphor can, at a pinch, be expanded a little. Both If Theatre’s subtly upsetting production, which gives us the natural without naturalism, and Keene’s Keene-esque text introduce a potent concoction of fear and helplessness into the observer’s consciousness as a defence against moribundity of the empathetic faculties. I’ll come back to the production in the examen to follow, mais sans métaphore ou image.
However, before I get too far into that, by way of introduction I am first posting here my thoughts on two points related to theatre criticism, both of which have together helped frame my response to this performance. [...]
Point the First: the scandal de jour, to persist with second-hand Gallicisms, as anyone finding their way to this blog will already know, is the MTC/Birthday Party-inspired debate over best critical practice (among other things).
On the one hand, we have the slighted Dr Julian Meyrick claiming that:
Good critics use their emotions as a means of framing (though not necessarily agreeing with) the public response to a show.
Which I take to mean that critics, when presenting their own response to a show, ought to attempt to give expression to, or at least take into account, in whatever way they choose, the broader public response. He said a lot of other stuff, very little of which I have sympathy with. But on this specific point I agree.
The counterpoint is put by the tutorly Peter Craven:
It is not the critics’ business to fudge their reaction or to mess about mediating the audience’s potential response. The critic is not there to review on behalf of the audience. The critic is the audience because he can have no opinion but his own.
He also said a lot of other stuff, much of which I do have sympathy with. But on this specific point I disagree.
I, as an audience member, am dead keen on talking about what I’ve seen with whomever will listen, whether that’s my companion for the night, a fellow casual audience member, a theatre industry pleb checking out the work of their colleagues, a professional reviewer or any of the long-suffering housemates I happen to cross when I get home a-nights. These sundry other sampled opinions I then seek to integrate into the written responses I post here.
The dialogue helps me better articulate my own response. Of course I don’t have to do it like that. But it’s more fun. It’s serious fun. But it’s still fun. And it doesn’t feel wrong. Why must Craven say fudge? Why not refine? And what’s wrong with messing about? There is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing-about. Who says the critic is not there to review on behalf of the audience? Common bruit? Many an ill thing is put about in that way. It certainly can’t be because it’s too hard. It’s as simple as asking the poor woman to your left who has been snuffling into her handkerchief these past ninety minutes what she thought of the play and why.
The practical objection, that one cannot canvas an entire audience, is pedantry: criticism, like Sunday boating, is not a statistical science.
The objection that a reviewer can have no opinion except his/her own, is, to me, a non-sequitur. Why must criticism be only about opinions? What happened to judgement? It almost goes without saying that I do not believe the two are synonymous.
Anyway, that’s not how I’ve been doing it, publicly, for seven months, which, in the scheme of things, is not long. Maintaining an awareness of the audience has helped me make clear the reasons behind my own opinions and helped me produce more interesting criticism. Interesting, at least, to my own fancy. But who knows? Things change. F’rinstance—
Point the Second: some time ago, months ago, I think, at the cyber epicentre of all things Aus. theat. crit., Ms TN posted a quote from Peter Brook’s The Empty Space and offered it as a ‘reminder’, viz., that theatre critics should cultivate some form of intercourse with those inside the theatre industry. Apparently for the health of the industry as a whole. The precise nature of said intercourse was not really gone into, although I got the sense—perhaps unfortunately scrambled—that ‘friendly relations’ were deemed sufficient.
As I am shy about some of the other things that Brook says in that particular work, I reacted dismissively to this suggestion. In an unhelpful and dissipative comment to Ms TN’s post, I said I thought that a critic’s faculty for impartial judgement needed to be kept safe from the corrupting influence of social relations with those to be judged. I suppose I was imagining the ‘faculty for impartial judgment’ as something like a genuine half hunter fob: one wears it to the theatre, of course, for it goes with the white-tie waistcoat; but certainly one does not expose such a precious instrument to the vicissitudes of less formal occasions.
All of which is nonsense and completely antithetical to what I want to make of my own experience as a theatregoer, as described in Point the First. If I’m so keen to talk, why not talk to those most directly interested? In May, 2009, my answer to this would have been: because it’ll be awkward and unhelpful: either gushy praise or elephant-ignoring causerie. But, last week, on being taught to think about it by the Meyrick–Woodhead–Croggon–Craven snafu, I thought, basically, Car’n, ya big baby, get into it.
So I sent the following brief e-missive to Matt Scholten, director of The Cove [excerpt only]:
I would like very much to put some of my critical thoughts to you personally as the director (and as a kind of alloyed audience member) and get your response. Sort of like an audience Q&A … but with more of an essay like focus. So, not like a press or academic interview … a dialogue specifically about this performance.
Does this sound like something you’d be interested in?
He, being the generous fellow he is, said that it was. Thus it was that I was able to bounce my critical thoughts off Matt himself (as well as other interested audience members), an experience that was not un-useful.
All of which brings us back to The Cove, weeks one and two of four, Café Table and Somewhere in the Middle of the Night (Keene world premiers) and Two Shanks and To Whom it May Concern (Keene revivals), about which I shall shortly post in full–
I’m very much with you on at least one point: opinion, while important, is not the be-all and end-all of criticism, and should rather be teamed with (or, perhaps, buttressed by) analysis and discussion, and channelled into judgement. Indeed, analysis and discussion help opinion to graduate to judgement. (Maybe opinion, in this semantic equation, is instinctual, where judgement is more considered? Or maybe not.) Personally, I fail to see how the four can be isolated from another at all without conscious effort, but there you go. (At last year’s Emerging Writer’s Festival, I spoke about the centrality of judgement, in particular, to the critic’s role, and attacked both description- and instinctual opinion-based reviews as detrimental to the culture! Talk about precocious. Still, judgemental-analytical criticism has always been where I’ve felt most comfortable.)
To some extent, however, I would disagree with your reading of both Meyrick and Craven on the same point. I agree that conversation and dialogue (before writing one’s review or otherwise) helps brilliantly to refine one’s opinion (and, indeed, that it is fun). Conversation, as much as solitary thought, is part of the process that turns one’s instinctual response (which is still important) into a more considered one. But engaging in conversation is hardly the same as “review[ing] on behalf of the audience,” which is what Craven attacked, nor the same as “framing … the public response to a show,” which is what Meyrick suggested was one of the critic’s duties. Craven’s choice of the word “fudge” does indeed sound a little misguided in this context, but no more than Meyrick’s choice of “framing”, which you seem to interpret much more broadly than you do “fudge”. In the end (in my considered opinion?), Craven is correct to suggest that one’s response essentially remains one’s own regardless of the influence that any post-show conversations may have upon it. As you yourself write, “The dialogue helps me better articulate my own response,” which, it seems to me, is rather the point: it still remains your own response, just better articulated. That still doesn’t mean it’s the critic’s job (whether a newspaper reviewer or otherwise) to record what everyone else thought. For one thing, to presume to do so would be the height of arrogance; even more arrogant, in fact, than presuming one’s subjective judgement is something others might be interested in. Everyone else, after all, can always start a blog…
Thank for reading Matt. Heaps of good points here. I’m esp. pleased to hear of your feelings on description- and opinion-based reviews. These were precisely my targets when I wrote about the B’day Party myself (it seems like months ago).
Opinions, whether they are a gut reaction or something more schematised (there’s a word to ponder) are necessary. But, to give the thing an Augustan shape (I don’t resile from it!), just as a judge who hands down an Opinion of the Court without detailing her reasons does no service to the development of common law jurisprudence, a Critic who advertises his Critical Opinion without detailing his reasons does no service to the development of criticism.
But–as to your second para.–in looking at criticism as a critical culture in the general sort of way we are here, I would really like it if some lessons could be taken as learned. Otherwise we never get around to looking at anything new.
Specifically, *of course* I know that it’s my response. I wrote it, so I expect people to assume that I take responsibility for the opinions (judgements) therein expressed. I would never presume to write on behalf of anyone else … obviously. At least, I wish it were obvious.
(I’m using ‘I’ here as a hypothetical).
I don’t think it does criticism any good to have an idea like ‘trying to frame the public response to a show’ shot down because that’s not the critic’s job and is moreover impossible.
First, it’s a given that whatever ‘frame’ is put together by the critic will ‘belong’ (in the way that ‘frames’ do ‘belong’) to that particular critic.
Second, tell me where the critic’s job description is spelled out so clearly as to exclude reporting ‘what other people said’? Is it possible, just possible, that the existence of an audience (of between 0 and x number of people) is necessary to the show? Is it possible that the audience is a part of the show?
Anyway, I’m getting hot under the collar, and STILL haven’t finished writing about The Cove. But perhaps later I’ll say something more about this ‘frame’ business, which is also chafing at my goiter.
Certainly, I often report what other people have said or written in my reviews. Indeed, I never wait to write my own before reading anyone else’s, which is to some extent rare. I do this mostly because I like to, well, frame my response within the critical discussion surrounding a given work. Alison mentioned that thing that critics sometimes do of reporting how out of place they feel in an audience enjoying a piece much more than they are: my review of Company B’s Baghdad Wedding is a good example. I think what annoyed me about Meyrick’s claim was that a critic has to do any of this; I agree with you that it isn’t written that they shouldn’t, but nor, for that matter, is it written that they should, and to suggest that it is or should be doesn’t do criticism any good either. The problem with any discussion of this type is that it eventually becomes a matter of people with different but equally valid practices claiming theirs to be the superior. The culture benefits from having both methods (in fact, it could several more, starting with more long-form criticism of the type practiced by yourself and others). In other words, Meyrick’s use of the word “duty” is what took my goat and got on it.
That said, I’m looking forward to what you’ll have to say about the word “frame” soon enough…