A couple of times during this issue’s
fortnight of openings I’ve had to think afresh about what it is that
reviewers are expected to write, and which criteria to employ.
The first occasion came during the interval of
Life After Scandal, when a
colleague buttonholed me for a rant about what he saw as the inherent
fraud of the verbatim theatrical form. Strictly speaking, it’s a
breach of protocol for me to name the colleague in question, but a
perusal of the reviews should leave you in little doubt (hint: look for
descriptions such as “spurious… blather… vacuous gimmickry”).
Simon (oh, damn!) seemed to be angered that verbatim theatre
simultaneously does and doesn’t edit: that it pretends to neutrality
whilst necessarily trimming its material according to the editor’s
particular aims. As a journalist who continues on a daily basis
to write news and general features as well as reviews, it really
shouldn’t strike him as either a surprise or a peculiar structural
failing that this happens even with reportage.
I also felt uncomfortable that the axe he was grinding seemed to be
about the entire genre rather than the individual play. Of
course, there are types and flavours of all kinds of work that each of
us gets on with awkwardly, but part of the reviewer’s job is to try to
get past that and write to a readership that may not share our
particular foibles.
Speaking
out
Or is it? Simon had what amounted to a strong belief that
verbatim was by its nature working against producing good, stimulating,
truthful theatre. He was, as far as he was concerned, trying to
advance the cause of theatre in general by speaking out against a
deleterious influence on it. What’s wrong with that? (OK,
he’s wrong in his view, but apart from that…) We can see other
reviewers pursuing agendas, say, against strong language or alleged
atheism, or in favour of more social realism; I’ve written in the past
about a reviewer arguing that a particular play should not have been
staged because he felt it glorified an evil political system; twice in
the past month I’ve found myself getting extraordinarily angry in
reviews I’ve written for the
Financial
Times, about instances when it has seemed to me that productions
have, as it were, commandeered dead people to endorse their particular
positions for commercial or artistic cachet. (On each occasion,
the worst of my tirade has been cut before publication.)
Certainly, we must remember that tastes differ, but there will always
be times when we’re just so fired up that we have to let it out.
And it can also make for better, or at least more entertaining, reading
when we so palpably have something to say and care so passionately
about saying it. When I get into conversations with taxi drivers
and tell them what I do, I usually call myself “a professional
opinionated git”. There are times when that’s a valuable way to
be.
Responsibility
Conversely, I’m currently engaged in an
exchange on one blog site where I’m being accused of rank hypocrisy for
giving The Masque Of The Red Death
a warm review when I admit on that site that there were things I didn’t
get out of the show. “And that [I wrote there] was precisely
because I did obey the company’s exhortation to explore for
myself. When I heard noise coming from one direction, I quite
often went in the other to see what might be hidden, and on virtually
every occasion, for me, the answer was nothing. (The first three
doors I tried during the evening were all toilets – who knew BAC had so
many?) Fair enough, that was partly my decision and partly bad
luck. But when you exhort people to allow for a plurality of opinion
and experience, it cuts both ways. It is perfectly possible to come out
of The Masque Of The Red Death
and say with all justification that you encountered nothing
substantial, and virtually nothing even recognisable, in terms of
intellectual or emotional content.” I continued that I wrote the
review I did “because I’m prepared to trust that such content is there.”
To some, this makes me a hypocrite who wrote a rave review (well, judge
for yourself) in order to be part of a critical consensus (if such a
consensus exists – again, you be the judge). I thought I was
exercising the kind of responsibility so often enjoined upon us to
report when our individual response to a production is at odds with the
majority. In this case, it was a matter not just of response, but
of actual material encountered or not. So: damned if we do,
damned if we don’t. Nobody said it was going to be a bed of
roses. (It certainly isn’t in some of that older West End
seating.)
In my review of the Chichester
Macbeth
reprinted in Issue 11, I wrote that “when [Patrick Stewart] even
slips up on verb agreement, it suggests that he is not listening to
himself”, at least on the press night. I was shocked to find on
its transfer to the Gielgud that he is still saying “Good things of day
begin to droop and drowse,/ Whiles night’s black agents to their preys
doth rouse.” Granted, English verb conjugation at the time was
slightly more inflected than it is now, but it’s hardly obscure that
“doth” is singular and “agents” plural. I’ve never seen a text
that rendered the line as “…doth rouse”. This may look like a
pedantic point, but I can’t help but see deeper implications. In
fact, I find it hard not to conclude that a man lauded as one of our
outstanding current classical actors either regularly doesn’t listen to
himself or doesn’t even know how the language works.