Distrust Amidst Misrule

Standing out from a crowd of 2,098 is not easy. For the next month, however, it will become a necessity for each individual show under the umbrella of the Edinburgh Fringe. If a production is to find an audience, an audience must find that production. The magnitude of the festival makes prominence a virtue.

As such, the Fringe is a festival desperate for attention. It is a classroom of frantically-waving arms eager to share their thoughts; a toddler tugging incessantly at your trouser-leg. The need to be noticed is overwhelming. You can see it on the poster-plastered surfaces. You can see it in the eyes of those thrusting flyers into hands. Most obviously of all, you can see it on the Royal Mile: a cobbled horror where one-upmanship rules and idiocy rises exponentially.

Within this peacocking culture, reviews take on an unusual status. Since a sure-fire way to attract an audience is with an assurance of quality, a good review becomes an asset. It sets a particular production apart from the amateurism that stalks the Fringe. Criticism becomes currency. It is boiled down to its component parts and endlessly regurgitated.

As the festival continues, Edinburgh itself increasingly resembles the Milky Way. By week two, the publicity materials that pepper the city have sprouted star-ratings. Spangled banners are wallpaper-pasted over posters and stapled onto flyers until every surface is made starry. Edinburgh becomes a city of constellations; a belt shop for obese Orions.

Being thus commoditised, reviews acquire – or rather, are prescribed – a certain value. The festival-goer is tricked into an unthinking acceptance of such products. Furthermore, given the number of shows that she will not see for herself, reviews often come to stand for the festival-goer’s impression of a production. There is little chance of verification and, as such, criticism becomes gospel.

Yet, the irony is that criticism is perhaps at its least trustworthy during the Edinburgh fringe. Only this week, Mark Shenton put forward a strong (though far from infallible) case for the supremacy of professional critics, in which he alludes to the shortcomings of criticism at the Fringe. In my eyes, the flaws are legion.

First among them is the sheer number of critics passing judgement for the month, each of whom is working according to a different standard and, indeed, individual tastes. Star ratings, which always give the illusion of being standardised, are here so relative as to be higgledy-piggledy. A shows’ critical reception becomes a matter of sheer luck dependent on the particular critic shipped off to review it. When one considers the scale of the operation, there can be no correlation of taste or expertise to the attribution process.

To further complicate matters, there are the politics of the individual critic – not to give too many slamming, to save the five star review, to give off an impression of moderate and level-headed judgement – and the ease/entertainment value of ridicule, whereby the critic elevates his or herself above the work. (I am not excluding myself from either of these wrongdoings, though I hope that I have got better with time. My first Edinburgh review back in 2005 culminated with an incitement to aim for the temple when invited to throw soap at the solo performer. I shan’t name the show – the damage has been done.)

Then there is the number of reviews that a given show will receive over the course of the festival. Accordingly the chances of a range of critical receptions are so high that a great proportion of shows will pick up at least one four-star rating. Moreover, it leaves reviews cancelling one another out. The regularity of five-one split, and even a full house of one through five, is far greater than in any usual critical culture.

Add to this the almost absolute anonymity granted to the Edinburgh critic and the whole system becomes dangerously close to collapse. I have written before about the need to understand a critic’s perspective in order to fully understand and appreciate his or her output. One must know their usual starting point, their biases and prejudices in order to fathom their position in relation to your own. In other words, critics are not themselves above judgement: they must earn the individual reader’s trust and, equally, the reader must determine how must trust to give.

In Edinburgh – barring a few notable exceptions that tend to write all year round – the above is simply impossible. Instead, the vast majority of criticism is attributable only to the publication in which it appears: Time Out, The Scotsman, The List, Three Weeks, Fest and so on, to each of which we ascribe a certain reliability value. For example, the Scotsman is deemed more trustworthy that Three Weeks, The List more so than Fest. The application of a certain standard across even a single publication’s writers, however, is clearly flawed.

All this is deliberately provocative. Over the three weeks of the festival, it is impossible to rely solely on luck and a good show will inevitably stack up more good reviews than a poor one. Aggregates, awards and audiences prove a fairly reliable guide. However, it certainly does impact upon the more obscure and challenging work at the Fringe. Work that defies populism, that seeks its own logic and sticks to its guns, that aims to interrogate before it entertains. In other words, difficult work suffers most from a critical culture that has become over-saturated with opinions.

And that, I believe, is an argument for the value of professional critics.