Criticism in the Theatre

• Forms of Criticism
• Conditions of Criticism
• Responding Process
• Handles for the Critic
• Writing the Review
• Critical Approaches

Collected lecture/discussion notes. Some parts are very fragmented, but offered here as a study aid, not a primary learning source. Citations noted where available.

Forms of Criticism

1. Difference between review and critique:
   • Review: Primarily a report; and immediate, journalistic response.
   • Critique: In depth, an evaluation, scholarly response.
2. Four types:
   • Newspaper
   • Magazine
   • Television
   • Scholarly analysis
3. Functions:
   • News
   • Impression
   • Values
   • Education
   • Feedback to artists
   • Social Commentary
   • Shaping the art form (encourage, discourage, educate, feedback)

Conditions of Criticism

"Audience completes the event; theatre exists because an audience agrees to let it exist."

Critic's role:

• -Reviewers give report, write for deadline, are interested in matters of taste and reaction. Part of market - consumer's guide.
• -Critic deals with play in relation to tradition of theatre, art, culture, and acts as intereter of new statements, preparing audience expectations (Have you ever seen or heard a piece, rejected it, read about it, appreciated it?).

Audience expectations:

• -Expect play to be related to life experience; authentic representation of some aspect of life as we know it.
• -Expect resolution and satisfaction in conclusions that is not found in life. We like theatre to be not like life.
• -Awareness of other audience members; expectation of collective, shared response.
• -Expect presentation in a manner and form it is used to.
  • -Expectations based upon previous theatrical experiences, which include movies and video, high school musicals and community theatre. Formulas succeed because of this joy in repetition of form, predictability.
  • -Also want to be surprised, moved, exhilarated.

Theatre's response:

• -"Playwright has an equally legitimate right to fulfill the truth of his or her vision as it is re-created in theatrical form, even if it means violating the audience's expectations."
• -"On the one hand the playwright gives the audience what it wants. On the other, the playwright must be true to his or her own vision of reality."
• -Box office theatre clearly is intended to satisfy audience expectations, not challenge them. Dinner theatre, community theatre, Broadway, etc.

Audience Reaction:

• -Playwrights provoke new awareness through shock and beguilement: Beguiles by being furtively attractive, has unrestrained evocative power. Shocks by confronting deeply-held taboos.
• -Much audience seeks escape, evasion, diversion. Eventually means a lack of challenge to expectations, lack of shock and beguilement. They leave piece to be forgotten. Temporary satisfactions.
• -Masterpieces outlive ephemeral works through truthfullness, provocation.

Theatre mirrors society:

• -Playwright and artists very sensitive to new directions in man's transaction with the rest of the world.
• -If playwright will provoke new views he must beguile us through truth.
• -New directions often due to discovery of truth that cannot be expressed in old forms.

Avant Garde

• -Deliberate attempt to upset the audience expectations.
• -History of artistic change is punctuated by violent violations of expectations. Especially in 20th Century, including many now-accepted modes.
• -Successful avant-garde in turn becomes mainstream and provokes new avant garde reaction.

Brocket: " a play may be deemed successful if it achieves the desired response from the audience for which it was primarily intended." Questions failure of activist drama to activate unconvinced.

Also:
-Respond to theatre non judgementally. Try to open up - don't judge or apply standards, but "read" what transpires. Reading imputes meaning to symbols or behavior. Afterwards, evaluate what you have "read".

Responding process:

Respond > describe > evaluate

Evaluation cannot occur while responding fully to a work. Response requires openness to stimuli, openness to associations and connections, and openness to the operation of the work itself.

Description creates the ground for evaluation, and is often more important.

Respond > Describe > Analyze > Interpret > Evaluate

Best approach to creative works.

Sensory > Formal > Expressive > Technical > Critical

Process for pulling together ideas and descriptive order.

Some Handles for the Critic

Analyzing a Play

1. What is the core emotional experience of the play?
2. What are the key images, the metaphors, in the play?
3. What are the main character relationships in the play,(i.e. father-son, master-slave, victimizer-victimized, etc). Hint: go deeper than the obvious.
4. What is the basic structure of the play? (I.E. is the play a series of vignettes, or does it follow a time and space sequential arrangement). As you know, plays may be classified structurally as both episodic and climactic according to different characteristics.
5. What are the key themes of the play?
6. What is the playwright's vision of reality?
7. Based on the responses to all of the above, what do you think is the meaning of the play?

Writing the Theatre Review

Barranger, Milly S. Theatre: A Way of Seeing. Fourth edition. New York: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1995. Pp. 360-363.

• Human significance
• Social significance
• Aesthetic significance
• Entertainment values
• Critics questions:
  • What was the Artist trying to do?
  • How well has he or she done it?
  • Was it worth doing?

Although there is no general agreement on criteria for judging a performance, the first step in writing theatre criticism is the ability to see. If we can describe what we see in the theatre, then we can begin to arrive at critical judgments. The play or production or both determines the approach - the structure of the review and the critical priorities. If the staging justifies a detailed account of what we observe, then the review incorporates a great deal of description. However, what we see in the theatre must connect with the play's meaning. For this reason, all theatre criticism involves both description and evaluation.

Since theatre is something perceived by the audience, writing about performance should be based on sensory impressions. As audiences, we are exposed to many significant details, sounds, and images, and only from them do we derive concepts or abstract meanings. Because we build critical concepts on the foundation of our perceptions, we can begin the process of seeing theatre critically by learning to describe our perceptions. A model for a theatre review written according to this method might take the following form (see Figure 14.3):

• Heading or logo
• Substance or meaning of play

  Select and prioritize these elements:

  • Setting or environment
  • Acting (actor and character)
  • Language
  • Stage business
  • Directing Costumes
  • Lighting and sound effects
  • Other significant human details

In writing any commentary it is necessary, first, to identify the performance to be discussed. Brooks Atkinson identifies both-play and playwright in the first paragraph of his review of A Streetcar Named Desire. Frank Rich of the New York Times identifies actress, play, and playwright in the two short opening paragraphs of his review of Rockaby. Margaret Croyden identifies the Hindu poem and the clashing dynasties in Peter Brook's nine-hour production of The Mahabharata for the New York Times.

Next, commentary on the play's substance or meaning informs the reader about the playwright's particular perspective on human affairs. Third, the performance involves what J. L. Styan calls "an environment of significant stimuli": sights, sounds, color, light, movement, space. These stimuli can be described by answering questions related to setting, costumes, sound, lighting, acting, and stage business. Is the stage environment open or closed, symbolic or realistic? What are the effects of the stage shape on the actor's speech, gesture, and movement? Is the lighting symbolic or suggestive of realistic light sources? What details of color, period, taste, and socioeconomic status are established by the costumes? What use is made of music and sound or light effects? What details separate the actor-at-work from his or her character-in-situation? What do the characters do in the play's action? What stage properties do the actors use and how are they significant? Finally, what visual and aural images of human experience and society develop during the performance? How effective are they!

Critical Approaches: