Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater

Thursday, 19 June 2008

"On Horror and Criticism"

Jana P, a Melbourne-based writer who maintains the blog mono no aware, posts today on the quality of London theatre criticism, taking recent critical reactions to Anthony Nielson's Relocated, at the Royal Court through 5 July, as her text.

After considering both the positive and negative reviews of the show, Jana remains dissatisfied. She writes:

[Even the positive reviews are] commendable, yet inadequate. For here we have all the usual ails: the need to assess as good or bad, the need to decipher the theme, the meaning, the purpose of the exercise, and an idea of art as a polemic, rather than what Susan Sontag called a thing in the world, something to sensually experience, appreciate for its own sake.

Going on, Jana also quotes from a recent post on Andrew Haydon's blog, in which Andrew goes into somewhat more detail about the qualities that British critical culture, at least as that which takes theatre as its subject, currently displays:

In many ways, partly because of this lack of a serious intellectual culture in British public life, having a more creative, interpretative critical culture wouldn't make much sense as there simply aren't that many plays being produced that would benefit from such rigours being applied to them. While say Martin Crimp and Howard Barker might enjoy such a regime change, current critical favourites from Alan Bennett to Roy Williams would find themselves left a bit out in the cold. The fact of the matter is, not much British theatre is actually very arty. It wears its messages and meanings plastered all over its sleeves and generally prefers to offer stories that anyone can readily understand with messages that it would take serious concentration to overlook. I generalise, but not by much. At the same time, this divergence of critical thought does explain why both Crimp and Barker, not to mention Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill, receive so much warmer receptions on mainland Europe than in Britain. It also provides the answer as to why so many normally intelligent, thoughtful British critics treat work by some of Europe’s more successful but idiosyncratic directors as if it is something to be debunked and dismissed.

Time doesn't permit me to apply Jana's and Andrew's assessments to current American critical culture.

So long as Lyn Gardner is offering modest proposals to place a moratorium on new productions of plays by Shakespeare, perhaps it's an interesting thought experiment to consider one more. Given the place of the reviewing and critical community in the post-capitalist ideology that maintains journalists, the business community and artists as closely-aligned participants in the discipline, maybe we should place a moratorium on criticism and reviewing as well. So long as we might think about "giving Shakespeare a rest," as Lyn puts it, perhaps our critics and reviewers could also use some time away from the theatre. Let's give the reviewers and theatre editors for the New York Times, Time Out New York, Backstage, the Guardian and nytheatre.com a paid one-year vacation and see what transpires.

Of course there are a number of reasons why this remains a thought-experiment; certainly the theatrical blogosphere is not mature enough, nor is it on the radars of enough theatregoers, to take the place of print criticism. But there are many self-evident reasons (they're evident to writers like Jana and Andrew, anyway, and perhaps to Nielson, Crimp and Barker as well) to believe that work which undermines and questions contemporary cultural ideology would be presented to working critics whose perspectives, professional interests and ideological prejudices do not permit the attention and mature consideration that this work may deserve. The other alternative, and perhaps more practical, is not to admit reviewers into one's productions, not out of fear but out of an appropriate mistrust of the bad faith that the critics' and reviewers' own public writings and comments demonstrate. Ultimately this means that productions would need to live out the length of their runs with neither positive nor negative reviews, and the lack of publicity which accords to them. It may be, though, an acceptable trade-off, and allow audiences to receive this work with neither preconception nor a prejudice formed by a critic. As Sir Humphrey Appleby might well put it, however, this would be the most courageous thing that theatre has ever done, with undoubtedly dire consequences. Though I wonder for whom those consequences would be most dire.

Jana's entire post, once again, is here.

Posted at 11.12 am in /Miscellaneous

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