Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Thursday, 14 February 2008
Recommended Reading: The Old Guard and the New
This weekend I hope to have enough time to read through the entire "The Critic as Thinker," Roger Copeland's discussion with Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein and Stanley Kauffmann just published in TCG's American Theatre magazine. I liked this from Bentley particularly:
My concern with the topic of this panel today is: Where is the theatre going to come from? What's it going to be, for people who have ambitions towards theatre criticism today? In my view, what distinguishes the good, valuable theatre critic is that in a review, or certainly in the current of his reviews, you sense that he's writing about a cause -- about a theatre in his or her mind. The criticism he is writing is possibly in some ways cloaked, but is a crusade. Bernard Shaw said he'd spent years and years crusading in his criticism for a new drama. Then he found out there wasn't any, and he had to write it. But he was crusading.
The article is distilled from a panel discussion held last October at New York's Philoctetes Center; the full transcript of the discussion is here. Jonathan Kalb, editor of Hot Review, also attended the conference and said there:
And what are we going to do about this problem of the disappearance of critical culture? You have to find ways to be sneaky, to be clever, and to find little avenues to continue it. I think that the world is kind of mixing up right now, and trying to figure out what the place for judgment and discrimination is in this new mediated, wired, info-age world. We all, I think, have spent time being depressed about this "everyone's a critic" ethos on the Internet. And everyone is a critic. But on the other hand, there's a couple of really good bloggers out there. So why take aim at all blogging?
Someone said to me the other day, "Hey, I saw the HotReview. What an idea -- an edited blog!" And I thought, "Wow, is that what I'm doing? I thought it was called a journal." You know, an edited blog used to be called a journal, where you're interested in the quality of the writing and you edit the writing carefully. That used to be called, you know, a journal. So maybe there are places for us to meet in the future, when all of this equalization sends up all of its dust. Everybody gets a chance to express the fact that they're a critic, and then becomes hungry again for the views of people who know a little bit more about the subject. So I don't know. Yes, I'm dismayed, I'm discouraged, but I also am in my 40s and have to look, hopefully, to a long life of figuring out what to do about this and I'm not giving up, regardless of what Eric says.
Many thanks to Slay at Theatreforté for the links.
Posted at 11.50 am in /Miscellaneous
Permanent link to this story
