Lyn Gardner tweeted at
me today saying that she doesn’t have the power to “kill any show” – only the
show itself has that power. I suppose in this economic climate it’s nice to
comfort oneself with the knowledge that whatever you write, good or bad, nobody’s
livelihood or career is on the line. But on that score Gardner is, I’m afraid, just
plain wrong.
Critics have been
obsequiously down-playing their might for many years – little old us, they’ll say, us
folks at the back of your papers? Of course we don’t have any real power – so of course this isn’t a personal
attack on just one critic. But Gardner’s comment, hot on the heels of an article
criticising the lack of new West End work from commercial producers was, as
Casting Director Anne Vosser rightly pointed out, misjudged.
Following many
years’ development and around £1million commercial investment, ‘Water Babies’ has
just opened at the Curve Theatre in Leicester – with a view no doubt to a West
End transfer. This is new musical theatre from an exciting team of emerging (and
established) creatives, the tickets are affordable (even premium tickets are just
£35) and, crucially, it’s good. Don’t
take my word for it – have a look on the twittersphere and you’ll see any
number of incredibly positive reviews from the paying public. This then, is
exactly the sort of work that Lyn Gardner wants, right? Wrong. The morning
after press night in Leicester, Guardian Gardner’s many thousands of readers
would have been treated to her one-star review of this “terminally high-minded
and interminably long” “mess” of a musical with “its fatal mix of musical
blandness and emotional mawkishness.” She wasn’t alone. Dominic Cavendish of
the Daily Telegraph delighted in his “water-torture to watch” word play, and
Kate Bassett of The Times was doing her best to critique the show oh so
intelligently, saying that she felt as if she’d “been sucked into the North
Atlantic garbage patch, the gyre in the ocean that’s a soup of chemical sludge
and decaying plastics.” I wonder how proud Gardner, Cavendish and Bassett are
of their ‘reviews’ of ‘Water Babies’, filled as they’re not with insightful criticism, nuanced as they’re not by years’ worth of professional
experience in reviewing theatre. This is grandstanding of the finest order, and
they’re wrong. I myself have had my fair share of bad and average reviews –
I’ve had a two-star from Lyn Gardner before and a 3-star from Dominic
Cavendish, for two productions that on any scale are simply not as good as ‘Water Babies’. Yes, for
sure, they’re Wilde-, even Waugh-witty, but these reviews are written for one
clear purpose – to entertain their readers – and just as surely they have one
outcome, and one outcome only: to kill the show. Because the simple truth is, like it or not, critics do have the power
to kill any show they choose.
Of course we can all
point to the exceptions. Yes, there’s ‘Les Misèrables’, there’s even ‘We Will
Rock You’, and there will forever be productions that last despite the critics.
For the most part that’s because their producers can afford to ride out the
storm, knowing as they do that the critics are simply wrong, and pumping
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in to convincing us to give them a
chance. Ten, twenty years later, they’re still with us. And of course there are
too the shows that fail despite the
critics. ‘I Can’t Sing’, one of the most perfectly entertaining, madcap
productions of the last decade, is closing despite being both brilliant and generally liked by the critics. But
let’s not allow the Gardners of this world, just because there is the odd
exception to the rule, just because someone spends enough money to buy the
Guardian itself on marketing their show to us in spite of poor opening notices,
let’s not allow them to believe that critics can’t kill shows.
One needs only to
walk down Shaftesbury Avenue, or pick up a paper, or go on a tube or a bus, or just
open one’s eyes, to see the power that the critics hold. Anywhere you see a quote
from a review, or more usually a set of four or five stars on a piece of
artwork, there’s your proof right there. Producers need stars, need quotes,
to sell their shows. The critics provide the marketing equivalent of oxygen to
productions, allowing them to survive. Productions don’t just miraculously
transfer from the likes of the Almeida, the Almeida or the Almeida – no, transfer
only if they have such glowing reviews that they simply must transfer. The ‘Jerusalem’s, the ‘Handbagged’s and most
probably the ‘King Charles III’s of this world have one thing and one thing only
in common with each other. Five stars. And lots of them. But if you can open
your eyes to this plainest and simplest of facts, then you can’t but also
accept that clearly the reverse is true. If a production gets slated,
irrespective of how good it is – no, dear reader, a bad review does not always equal a bad show – then the
show’s oxygen has been cut off. There is simply nothing that can be done. You
can buy all the advertising space in the world, you can put your artwork on
every bus in the country, but there is absolutely no point doing that without,
you guessed it, stars and quotes. If cutting off the oxygen to a show isn’t
killing it, I don’t know what is…
Mark Shenton said
that the sheer volume of opinions out there as to the quality of theatre meant
that “reliable, trusted, professional guides are more necessary than
ever.” When it comes to ‘reviews’ like Tim Walker’s of ‘Billy Elliot’ a few
years ago which reviewed the standard of the theatre’s toilets rather than
reviewing you know, the show, or
Charles Spencer’s attack on Tommy Steele a while back, or these most recent
attacks on ‘Water Babies’, he is absolutely right: if there is a place in
theatre for critics then what they do should indeed be professional. But I long
for a day when critics will understand the power they hold over productions,
and in true ‘Superman’ style use that enormous power with just a modicum of
responsibility. In an environment when raising money from investors is near
enough impossible, when producers are struggling against the commercial and
subsidised juggernauts of this world to get their product to a West End stage,
it is now more than ever that the critics should be encouraging new work,
finding the positives and not just going after a cheap byline. And if they
truly do care about new work, then perhaps they should be going to actually see far more new work from truly
emerging practitioners, instead of loitering in the comfortable bars of a very
few theatres, slurping free wine and
juice, clutching their free programmes,
having collected their free tickets
for the best seats in the house.
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