A 'Plague' on Both Their Houses

Just as violence begets violence, criticism has this week spun itself into a cyclone in a teacup over Plague Over England. Usually, I despise those that wade into online debates with the opening: “I haven’t seen the play, but...” However, here the play’s own qualities, on which I am in no place to comment, seem to me entirely irrelevant. Rather, the issue at stake is the responsibility of the critic(s).

Plague Over England has, both at the Finborough and in its recent West End resurrection at the Duchess, received a mixed bag of reviews. Some have been positive (Bravo, Charles!), some ambivalent (Bravo, Ian!) and some less than positive (Bravo, Rhoda!). In turn, the positive amongst those reviews have themselves received a truly awful set of notices, which, in the process, sling a quiverful of arrows at de Jongh’s play itself. Not least among them John M Morrison’s piece for the Guardian Theatre Blog, which goes so far as to label it a “limp apology for a play”. The accusations of unprofessional conduct, that the critics have rushed to praise one of their own, have in turn led to defensive parries from Michael Billington, Mark Shenton and, less formally, Ian Shuttleworth. Now, the purchasing masses are stirring in revolt against the Critics’ Circle, brandishing ticket stubs and placards reading, “Death to dead white males!”

One comment on Michael Billington’s blog entry sets out a peculiarly absolutist stance on the notion of personal connections between critics and artists: “It strikes me as incredibly obvious that no critic should review anything produced by people they have a personal relationship with. That means no writers reviewing books by their friends, no rock critics covering their mates' albums, no music reviewers writing about the orchestra their girlfriend plays in etc etc.” The comment brings to mind a recollection of Lyn Gardner describing the critic’s existence as a lonely one. The critic, she implied, can never be friends with the artist for the sake of judicious impartiality.

However, the passionate critic – and these are the critics that are truly fit for purpose – necessarily, or at the very least, inevitably, builds a personal relationship with the work of artists, if not with artists themselves. Art speaks. It speaks about us. It speaks about the world. It speaks about what it is to be alive now and about what it is to be human. Moreover, it speaks to us. And it speaks to us in different ways. In speaking it wraps us up in itself, it consumes us and spits us out somehow different, it affects our everyday lives. Art alters. It alters us, but it does not do so universally. Personal relationships with work cannot but intermingle with criticism. Criticism revolves around perspectives as much as taste. It is as relative as it is subjective. Lyn Gardner recently gave Shun-kin a two star review on the basis of comparison with Complicite’s canon, whilst admitting that there was much to admire. Benedict Nightingale awarded it four in comparison, presumably, with a wider spectrum of theatre. Was either wrong or misleading? I wouldn't say so.

Of course, the notion of personal relationships with work affects and involves taste. No sane person can disallow a critic the right to taste and preference. To do so is to insist on unfeeling critic-o-meters and impossible scales of comparison. Thus, up crops Hume and his standard of taste, whereby the subjective opinion of the ‘true’ critic can approach and even stand in for objectivity.

This is where Morrison argues that failures have been made with regard Plague Over England: the critics say one thing, the audience say another – therefore, the critics have ‘got it wrong’. (A fairer analysis of this particular situation, as Ian Shuttleworth has pointed out, is that some of the critics say one thing and some of the audience say another.) Regardless, Morrison equates good criticism with a reflection of audience experiences, preferences and tastes. It is the alignment of subjective opinion with the majority view (or better, the view of a qualified majority) that allows the critic to judge on our behalf. Here, critical authority is conferred by conformity. The critic’s responsibility is to the potential audience, to the readership as a whole entity.

However, a subtler view is that the critic acts as representative of those that share his/her tastes; their own particular readership, as it were. Here, the critic’s responsibility is to him or herself – it is to recognize as precisely as possible one’s feelings about a production and to relate them with clarity and honesty. Such criticism admits of its own subjectivity and, importantly, its own fallibility. Crucially, in this model the readership have their own responsibility. The individual reader must appreciate the critic’s personal taste (admittedly, based on inductive reasoning) and make judgement on reviews accordingly. In actual fact, then, the critic is representative of no one bar him or herself, but may be elevated or elected as authoritative or representative by the individual reader.

Increasingly, I feel that the critic has no responsibility to any readership that might use a review as recommendation. Instead, I see the critic as having responsibility to a readership totally incapable of witnessing the production for themselves, to a readership of the future, to a readership with its own opinions willing to enter into debate, to history and to the artist and, most importantly of all, to the artwork itself. For, even with the age of recording equipment, it is through such responses that theatre lives on in some refracted, reflected but truthful, meaningful sense. And if we view criticism in such a way, the names and causes of artists, practitioners and makers become of far less import than the work itself.

Criticism as record. As service to art. As witness statement.

Art, therefore, as incident.

I am not entirely sure how much sense the above makes as a whole. While writing, thoughts entangled and twisted out of recognition. It veered from one topic to another before nestling somewhere it never intended to pass through. Hopefully amidst the non-sense there are some fragments of coherence.