Theatre and the Act of Criticism- Afterword from Critical Moments

Fintan O’Toole

Dear Fintan,

You’re wrong about [my play]. The problem with any theory, such as yours about contemporary Irish drama, is that it needs to modify itself when faced with individual plays, not try to modify the plays to fit the theory. If you had done that, you might have noticed a rather more complicated, stylistically and thematically heterogeneous play than you were prepared to see. […]

What I’m trying to do is, ironically, what you accuse me of as if it is a problem: merge social comedy or comedy of manners with philosophic or spiritual tragedy. […]. Maybe you think it can’t be done. […] But here’s the thing: you can’t judge it by latching on to whatever style (comedy of manners) you first recognize, and then disallowing all the other diverse elements. You have to allow for the juxtaposition of styles and themes, for the impurities and vulgarities. You have to watch it with an open mind. Judging from your review, I don’t think you did. […]

And the actors (and director) had a hollow laugh at your suggestion that they were never stretched: this was an immensely gruelling rehearsal period, and it’s an incredibly demanding play to perform. […] And if the cast make it look easy, well, that’s because they’re brilliant.

Mostly though, what pissed me off was the dismissive tone: even if I were to hold myself at your judgement of me, as a kind of facile wit, a sardonic, satirical entertainer – are we actually so overwhelmed with those virtues in the Irish theatre that you can afford to be so mean-spirited and begrudging? And as I don’t, as I’m clearly trying to do something way larger, well, maybe you think I don’t succeed, but is there no virtue in trying to write a State of the Nation, Way We Live Now play, one that embraces religious and philosophical and political ideas? Or are you so consumed by your theory that that kind of synthesis can’t be achieved any more that you’re unable to see what’s actually before your eyes? Or that it might be achievable, just not by me?

The least I feel I’m entitled to from the Theatre Critic of Record is a fair viewing: I don’t believe you gave me one. You used to write a column called Second Opinion; in this case, I think you should have one. Because, first time round, you were wrong.

These are extracts from a letter I received from a distinguished Irish playwright whose latest work I had just reviewed. It is fairly typical of such correspondence. Having unfavourable things said about you in print is an unpleasant experience. (I know this because I am attacked in print far more often and far more harshly than any playwright, actor or director.) The psychic immune system responds to this invasion of nasty thoughts with the insistence that the criticism is evidence, not of one’s own failings, but of the prejudices, inadequacies and perversions of the critic. The reply is written and I suspect in most cases torn up and put in the bin. The desire not to give the bastard the satisfaction usually outweighs the desire to give him a piece of your mind. Sometimes, though, especially since the invention of e-mail, the angry epistle is fired off before the forces of restraint can interfere. The wounds are exposed and the cry of pain is heard.

I could be smart and point to my long experience of the paradox whereby the same people who reassure themselves of your complete idiocy when you don’t like one piece of their work are suddenly reminded of your brilliance and perspicacity when you are enraptured by another. I could point out that for every complaint of excessive harshness from a playwright, actor or director I get ten complaints of excessive kindness from disgruntled theatregoers. I could also suggest, again from experience, that what I write, even at my most intemperate is mildness itself compared to the things theatre folk say about each other.

But in fact I have a great deal of sympathy with such complaints. Theatre is an inherently ephemeral form. Neither a script nor even a high-quality video recording preserves the event in any real sense. Even the same production of the same play encompasses performances that vary widely from night to night. To see a production at the end of its run is – for better or for worse – to witness a very different spectacle from the one that took its first steps on opening night. And what is left to history? The musings and impressions of a handful of observers who are, merely by virtue of their profession, entirely untypical of the audience. Theatre history itself, moreover, is shaped by these people: a new play that is slaughtered by the critics may not have an afterlife at all.

From the point of view of those involved in a production, moreover, there is the added infuriation that these observers are outsiders who do not understand the intentions of the artists. In fact, it is even worse than this. It is not just that I, as a critic, do not understand their intentions. It is – and this is where the greatest gulf of misapprehension between the practitioner and the critic yawns – none of my business to understand. I am not interested in what they want to say, but in what they actually succeed in saying. The critic’s interest is not in intention but effect. And the appalling truth is that the only effect that the critic can measure is that on him or herself. In that sense, criticism is essentially a kind of self-analysis. The critic is asking the simple but rather solipsistic question: ‘What effect did this have on me?’

And here’s where the real trouble starts. For although this question is capable of being answered honestly and with integrity, no one but the critic can testify to that honesty. The standards of accountability that apply to other kinds of journalism are rendered almost entirely redundant when it comes to criticism. If I write that Politician C took a bribe from Businessman B, I have to prove it objectively with documents, witnesses or other evidence. Other people can establish whether or not I’m telling lies. But if I claim that my correspondent’s ‘stylistically and thematically heterogeneous play’ actually struck me as a bit of a mess, no one can tell whether I’m giving a truthful account of how I felt when I came out of the theatre or pursuing some stupid ideological or personal agenda. It is quite possible that every single review in this book is a lie, that I really loved the shows I panned and hated the ones I raved about. The only person who actually knows for sure is me.

For the plaintiff, this is rough justice. My correspondent who demands a Second Opinion must know that this court of appeal would be just as arbitrary. If I were to review the play a second time, and come to a different conclusion, the praise would be meaningless, coming, as it would do, from a critic who has proved to be so untrustworthy the first time. If someone else reviews it in my place, the view is theirs, not mine, and it is part of my professional ethic not to be swayed by other people’s opinions. And even if the second view contradicts the first, who is to say that it is more honest, more insightful and more sensitive? Unless we are to say that gushing praise is innately more truthful than murmurings of disapproval, the question cannot be answered.

This works both ways, of course. Just as my correspondent can’t prove that I watched his play with a closed mind, I can’t prove that my mind was open. I can point to some reasonably obvious factors. I can say that I genuinely want to like everything I go to see, not because I am Mister Bountiful, but because there are few things on earth more boring, more dispiriting and more tortuous than a bad piece of theatre. I am, it is true, paid to write reviews, but I can make a living without doing so, and frankly the money isn’t worth the hours of excruciating torment that a run of bad plays inflicts on the viewer. (Remember that the torture is actually worse for critics. The ordinary playgoer is having a night out, and can deaden the pain with drink or, at worst, leave at the interval.) I can say, too, that a quick look over these reviews should confirm that I do, as my correspondent demands, modify my general views in the face of the particular experience of a particular piece of theatre.

But these claims, too, are impossible to test. If, as Karl Popper has shown, the essence of a scientific statement is that it is capable of being falsified, then criticism is resolutely unscientific. And this means that it is also essentially unaccountable. As someone who spends many of his waking hours as a journalist demanding accountability of people who occupy positions of public power, I cannot be unaware of the irony of occupying a position of minor but essentially unaccountable power myself. If a politician accused of bad faith were to say: ‘Trust me’, I would be the first to attack. Yet when my correspondent accuses me of bad faith, what can I reply? ‘Trust me, I did my best to enjoy your play’.

The truth is that the word that rings out like a knell in the first and last sentences of my correspondent’s letter – wrong – is simply misplaced. There is of course a simple sense in which a critic can be wrong – one of my predecessors at In Dublin who reviewed Hamlet under the impression that Gertrude is the prince’s aunt, for example, was clearly wrong. Reviews which refer to Richard Brinsley Sheridan as a Restoration playwright are wrong. Calling Waiting for Godot a naturalistic play would be wrong. But ‘wrong’ in the sense that my correspondent means it – mistaking his wonderful play for a less-than-wonderful one – does not compute. Critics are honest or dishonest, not right or wrong. They either express what they thought or felt or they distort it. And even if they distort it for nice reasons – they admire the playwright’s other work, they know how hard the cast has worked and how much a good review would mean to them, they want the theatre to do good business – they are liars.

No one in the theatre complains about these nice lies, of course. Given the capricious nature of the business and the often arbitrary nature of criticism, theatres can hardly be blamed for using quotes from critics they regard as fools or knaves to sell their shows. Theatre people are, besides, inured to the social necessities of their small world in which ‘You were marvellous, darling’ serves as the currency of mundane politeness in much the same way that ‘How are you?’ does among the civilians. But for those of us who do this unaccountable job, there is nothing to hold on to but honesty. Since no one can really check whether or not we are telling the truth about our reactions, the only handrail is the critic’s own integrity.

It seems to me that this is true even in the most extreme of cases. If we look back, for example, on the eighteenth century critics who thought that King Lear was unplayable as Shakespeare wrote it or that Ibsen was vile or, conversely, that Richard Cumberland was a theatrical genius, it seems easy to say that they were wrong. But this is to forget that they were not writing for us. Their reviews were not missives to posterity. They were telling their readers how it seemed to them in the here-and-now that they all occupied. And in fact the notion that the last act of King Lear is unstageable, which may seem almost incom-prehensible to us, has the integrity of its time and place. The fact that someone might genuinely have felt it is surely a powerful indication of a particular mentality. It still tells us something, not about Shakespeare but about the critics and about the culture in which their views did not seem absurd.

I know, of course, that this is a deeply unsatisfactory state of affairs. The notion that critics can be neither right nor wrong renders theatre people powerless, since there really is no arguing about taste. But, if it’s any consolation, it also renders the critic powerless. It does so in a double sense. I actually can’t help liking or disliking a show. I can’t decide to be impressed or to be bored. All I can do is describe as accurately as possible what I felt. And this sense of powerlessness should be balanced by another. The power of the critic to dictate what is good and bad, to be the arbiter of value, has to be broken. If the review is merely a record of the critic’s feelings, it should not bear the weight of great authority.

The only people who can break that power, though, are the readers. It is for them to take the review for what it is – one person’s impressions which may be worth taking into account in deciding what to see and may be worth considering as a foil to the reader’s own thoughts and feelings after the play has been seen. So if this book of reviews which were not written for posterity is worth reading at all it is not as a history provided by what my correspondent calls The Theatre Critic of Record. All that is recorded here is the fluctuating reactions of an individual with unconscious prejudices and blind spots, with likes and dislikes for which he cannot account, stuck with a particular set perceptions because they are the only ones he has. It is, I hope, sufficiently fragmentary, episodic, annoying, incomplete and contradictory to remind readers of its glaringly obvious limitations.

Extract From: Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre, eds, Julia Furay and Redmond O’Hanlon (2003)

Cross Reference: Reception, Audiences

See Also: Talking About Tom Murphy, edited by Nicholas Grene and Fintan’s essay on The Dublin Theatre Festival