This
was commissioned by Simon Bowes to be presented at the symposium Hold Everything Dear: Performance, Politics and John Berger happening
later today, as part of a trio of responses to that title by
Something Other, the website I co-make with Mary Paterson and Diana
Damian Martin. So really this belongs there, but my lovely friend
David pointed out that I haven't posted on here in aeons, also this
week is the seventh anniversary of Deliq and this writing
reflects on how and why it started, so it makes sense to cross-post.
Anyway: another polish of the pebble on which I think about how I do
theatre criticism. Thank you for reading.
*
Before I read any
Berger – and I was late coming to him – I read an interview with him by Nicholas Wroe, published in the Guardian in April 2011, in
which he talked about his “decision to abandon painting to write
full time”. Wroe quotes him as saying: “Painting is something
that you need to do if not every day, then certainly most days. It is
almost like being a pianist, if you stop you lose something. The
phrase 'Sunday painter' is not often a compliment. I was attracted to
the novel form because I was attracted to the mystery of a person's
subjectivity and behaviour, their destinies and choices. The things
that can't be schematised. The challenge is to try not just to
explain the mystery, but to ensure the mystery is shared and doesn't
remain isolated.”
In April 2011 I felt a
shift or a seep or a click in my brain, perhaps all three motions at
once: my second child had recently turned two, the first was now
four, and this movement inside – a synaptic jolt, the electricity
surging, or simply turning back on – meant I could think clearly
again.
And so I started
thinking out loud, otherwise called blogging. I wanted to write about
theatre in untrammelled ways not afforded to me by my day job in
journalism. At the time – in many ways still – bloggers were
looked down on by professional critics: you couldn't, for instance,
become a member of the Critics' Circle Drama Section as someone who
self-published. Bloggers were criticism's Sunday painters. Becoming
one created, for me, a new possibility: in unprofessionalism there
was space to think about criticism as art.
I have a difficult
relationship with the word art because in my early 20s I knew I'd
never have the audacity or tenacity to be an artist – specifically
painter – and that's partly how I ended up writing about theatre.
And perhaps I still wouldn't be using the word now but for two
things: working with Mary Paterson, and a passage Berger wrote in The
Shape of a Pocket, describing the relationship between the painter
and the object of their gaze:
“The impulse to paint
comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably
blind) but from an encounter... When a painting is lifeless it is the
result of the painter not having the nerve to get close enough for a
collaboration to start. … The modern illusion concerning painting
… is that the artist is a creator. Rather he is a receiver. What
seems like creation is the act of giving form to what he has
received.”
What a beautiful way of
thinking about writing about theatre: a collaboration, with the
critic coming close enough to receive, and giving form to that
received.
Blogging shaped a
pocket in which I could give different forms to writing about
performance, not only treating the form of the “review” as
plastic, malleable, open to invention, but through that attempting a
different kind of collaboration with its makers. I'm still finding
the words for how to describe that relationship: for a while I talked
of writing that honours the form of the work, by seeking to match it
or mirror it or converse with it somehow. More recently I've started
thinking about voice: the ways in which I'm trying to speak back to
the work in something like the voice with which it spoke to me,
listening so closely for its register and cadence that my writing
corresponds to it but at a remove: harmony to its melody. The impulse
to write comes from an encounter with that voice.
I choose to write and
to think about criticism this way not because I want to resist being
judgemental (although often I do), but because more and more I think
the challenge of writing about theatre is to try not just to explain
the mystery, but to ensure the mystery is shared and doesn't remain
isolated. Because theatre is isolated: in place and time. Very few
people see it. I want its voice to be heard beyond that very few. I'm
interested in the question of how to stop my voice getting in the
way.
That challenge has
changed my reading of another passage by Berger, later in The Shape
of a Pocket, that again describes the act of painting but speaks to
me about criticism. He's distilled painting to two words, face and
place:
Whatever the painter is
looking for, he's looking for its face. … And 'its face' means
what? He's looking for its return gaze and he's looking for its
expression – a slight sign of its inner life. ...
A place is more than an
area. A place surrounds something. A place is the extension of a
presence or the consequence of an action.
How does a painting
become a place? … When a place is found it is found somewhere on
the frontier between nature and art. It is like a hollow in the sand
within which the frontier has been wiped out. The place of the
painting begins in this hollow.
What preoccupied me six
years ago when I read this was that hollow in the sand where the
frontier between nature and art, between critic and theatre-maker,
between you and me, has been wiped out. But what preoccupies me now
is the place that extends from that hollow, created from the
encounter of the work's voice with mine. What are the parameters of
that place, what are the politics, and who feels invited or permitted
to inhabit it too?
Berger stopped painting
because he “was attracted to the mystery of a person's subjectivity
and behaviour, their destinies and choices”. I have a difficult
relationship with writing because in my early 20s I knew I'd never
have the audacity or tenacity to be a writer – specifically
novellist – and that's partly how I ended up becoming a theatre
critic. As a blogger I've had more space in which to acknowledge the
ways in which my background, education, tastes, desires, loves,
secrets, frets and hurts affect the way in which I receive theatre.
Often the return gaze that I see looking for the face in a
performance is my own reflected: I might try to escape into theatre
but I'll meet myself coming back, with all the discomfort that
brings. I'm interested in how others might meet their own gaze.
When I say others what
I mean is people who don't make or write about theatre, who might
have all sorts of complicated thoughts about the work they see, but
not a place in which to articulate them. The brilliant theatre-maker
Tanuja Amarasuriya wrote about this in a provocation delivered at a
festival I co-curated in 2014:
There’s an awful
phrase that theatre professionals use a lot in reference to casual
theatregoers: real people. “I really want to know what real people
think of my work.” ... It’s a horrible term that demeans
everyone; it dismisses theatre-makers as phoneys and patronises
non-professionals as less informed.
Her provocation was
that more people should feel part of the conversation about theatre:
in the bar afterwards, in blogs, in reviews. She continued:
We need to encourage
everyone to own their individual responses to art. If you’ve never
talked about the way something makes you feel, and the only
expressions you hear about how a piece of art makes you feel, don’t
align with what you actually feel… then you might very well either
keep quiet or believe you’re wrong. I don’t think it’s about
hearing from real people, I think it’s about hearing from more
people.
To make this concrete,
Tanuja went on to describe how “talking about the work and hearing
other people talk about the work” changed her father's relationship
to art, encouraging him to attend, pay attention, and “influencing
the way he thought about ideas and people”. This mattered, she
wrote:
because my Dad comes
from Sri Lanka, a country that has been riven by a brutally divisive
civil war that I don’t think anyone inside, never mind outside the
country has any objective perspective on. It’s a country where
people I know as liberally-minded, progressive individuals suddenly
become fearfully defensive and defined in opposition. It’s a
community that needs more people who can appreciate that their own
thinking about a particular theme can change rapidly over the space
of a conversation; and more people who respect different
interpretations of the same subject by different people.
In the years since
Tanuja wrote this, the UK has experienced a conservative upswing
triggered by the EU referendum and now I don't think it's too
fanciful to describe ourselves as “a community that needs more
people who can appreciate that their own thinking about a particular
theme can change rapidly over the space of a conversation; and more
people who respect different interpretations of the same subject by
different people”. I'm thinking not just about leave vs remain, but
about the toxic conversation happening now about anti-semitism, the
fire burning between some cis- and trans-women. In the days that I've
been writing this, Quentin Letts has been pouring tar over the RSC
for casting a black actor in what he considers a white role and it's
really easy, as a theatre critic writing towards social revolution,
or at the very least a Labour government brave enough to redistribute
wealth, restore the welfare state and redefine the narrative around
immigration, to say: there's a world of difference between me and
Letts. He's racist, homophobic, misogynist, classist, boorish,
priggish, and writes, to quote Berger in Hold Everything Dear, by
spraying “ethicides – agents that kill ethics and therefore any
notion of history and justice”, in doing so destroying or making
extinct “set after set of our human priorities”. I try very hard
not to.
But those ethicides
reach into the hollow in the sand where the frontier between nature
and art, between critic and theatre-maker, between you and me, has
been wiped out. How could they not? They affect the place that
extends from our presence, that is the consequence of our actions.
I'm thinking about the work I choose to see, the voices I choose to
attend to, the voices I hear, and which I support. I'm thinking about
unconscious or assumed notions of excellence, and who gets to paint
or play piano every day, and of something the performance-maker
Selina Thompson said in an interview with Sarah Gorman in 2017,
summarising a discussion she has often with other performance-makers
who are women of colour:
We talk about how lots
and lots of white people, especially men, especially middle class
white men, make very mediocre work. And it’s okay, it’s all
right. And we talk about how I actually don’t want to make
exceptional work anymore. I want to make mediocre work, and it be
okay. To resist that call to ‘excel’ all the time.
I'm thinking about the
phrase 'Sunday painter', and why it's not often a compliment. Who is
responsible for ensuring it's not a compliment. And who has the power
to change that.
The times I feel most
privileged to do the work I do aren't when I get free tickets to
sold-out shows, although that's a bonus, or when something I've
written is praised, although that's a boost to the ego, but when I
host a theatre club. I've been doing these for five years now – a
very simple discussion event modelled on the book group, sometimes
happening post-show, sometimes at a late point in a performance run
so people can see the show in their own time then come and talk about
it – and it feels symptomatic of theatre's failure – as an
industry – to demonstrate any genuine interest in dialogue that the
work it stages might inspire that there isn't a space like this for
every work ever put on. The people who come are bus drivers, social
workers, architects, administrators; they've experienced addiction,
abuse, homelessness; they are young, old, religious, agnostic, of
every possible background. All of them bring to theatre all the
mystery of a person's subjectivity and behaviour. They look for
theatre's return gaze and often they are startled by the gaze other
people have seen; they come having hated the work, and leave wanting
to see it again. The place of theatre criticism, for me, begins in
this hollow, within which the frontier between professional and
quotidian critique has been wiped out.
I came late to Berger
and now I'm slowly working my way through his books; most recently,
Bento's Sketchbook. At the end, Berger offers a brief biographical
sketch of Benedict Spinoza, for whom it was made, admiring “his
calm, his frugality, his cheerful humour, his pertinence, and his
manner of being adequate”.
I wonder what happens
to theatre, to criticism, to social dialogue, if we resist the
imposing voice of excellence, and celebrate instead the everyday, the
Sunday painters, this manner of being adequate. I have a difficult
relationship with the word expert because lack of audacity and
tenacity has me most days feeling like a fraud, but then the EU
referendum made that relationship more difficult still, because the
word expert was sprayed – asphyxiated – with ethicides by the
leave campaign and I want to distance myself from that. But there's
no qualification in theatre criticism: only long years of watching
and writing, by which token even Quentin Letts, who began reviewing
for the Daily Mail in 2004, might rank among the experts. I wonder
what happens to criticism if we describe the expertise needed to
understand it differently: as an expertise in being human, alive and
surviving this world, sharing its mysteries with each other.
 |
| The last painting I was working on, still unfinished when I gave up |
