Issue 7, 2010
Prompt Corner
Sometimes, with the best will in the world, a review backfires. I thought I was being cleverly preemptive in my review of the Willy Russell plays at the Menier: Russell, I thought, as a fine dramatist of the working class, would inevitably be strongly patronised. In the event, my own writing reads
as far more patronising than anything by any of my colleagues. Charlie Spencer sings Russell’s praises a lot more directly, and thus a lot more effectively, than me.
Revealing
And sometimes we simply misunderstand. I find reviews of plays dealing with mental illness among the most revealing of reviewers’ attitudes and understanding, and the crits of Mark Haddon’s Polar Bears are no exception. Quentin Letts sees protagonist Kay’s problem as being that she “has a split personality”; Tim Walker, as subtle in his distinctions as ever, calls the play simply a “depiction of madness, or bipolar disorder as we are supposed to call it these days”. (This is the kind of taxonomical grasp that led World War I panels to classify shell-shock as “lack of moral fibre”, leading to the execution of more than 300 sufferers.) Statistics show that one in four of the British population will suffer from some form of mental illness in any given year, yet some of us either can’t or won’t distinguish between basic kinds.
It’s not as if they have no examples to draw on: I am hardly the only critic known to be a unipolar depressive (sometimes I feel at least half-seriously that I miss out on the fun of the manic phases of bipolarity), and of course Paul Taylor’s lengthy, insightful review is written with the knowledge and experience of one who lives with a similar (though less intensive) bipolar condition to Kay’s. I’m not suggesting that DSM-IV should be every reviewer’s bedtime reading, but such casual and on occasion even blithe ignorance about any other comparable number of people in the population as a whole – three times as many as the entire non-white UK population, four to five times as many as the homosexual population, more even than the entire non-Christian or non-professingChristian population of the country – would be seen as clearly culpable.
Otherness
The “as we are supposed to” mentality also seems to manifest in Quentin Letts’ review of Andersen’s English. He writes: “The creed of ‘colour-blind casting’ insists that a black man can play a white man [ ... ] and that audiences and critics should not protest, but I’m afraid it is absurd here.” It strikes me that Quentin is here making a basic error of implicitly equating “should not protest” with “should not notice”; it doesn’t seem to occur to him that we may have been meant to pay attention to the casting of Danny Sapani as Hans Christian Andersen.
Aleks Sierz, on the same page of this issue, grasps it entirely and deals with it almost in passing: Andersen’s “Danish otherness”, he notes, is “emphasised by the fact that he is played by a black actor”. When the only non-white member of the cast is playing the only character from outside the hermetic Dickens household, it’s surely not unreasonable to wonder whether there might be a connection. Max Stafford-Clark has apologised if the after-effects of his stroke lead to his occasionally leaving actors too static for too long, explaining that he loses them from his now-limited peripheral vision... but he is unlikely not to notice such a correspondence, and unlikely not to intend it to be noticed and understood.
Enjoyment
Once again, the openness of the participants in the National Student Drama Festival can serve as an admirable example to the rest of us. A few years ago, discussions at the festival would regularly run aground on the unwillingness of companies to accept virtually any significant criticism, and indeed such criticism was regularly condemned as negativity (spot the irony – they didn’t) which interfered with an “all must have prizes” kind of attitude. That has changed radically, with participants now both more thoughtful in wording their criticisms but above all eager to learn from frank discussion of the aspects of their shows that didn’t work as well as those that did.
In the middle of the decade, I once or twice arrived in Scarborough with an article already written, which I knew would be needed as a counterblast to “constructive criticism is all very well, but not this...” complaints; now, I turn up anticipating virtually unalloyed enjoyment... and yes, that can even include a production of Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love. Congratulations to the winners of this year’s student critics’ awards, Dan Hutton and Jasmine Woodcock-Stewart, whose prizes include a year’s free subscription to Theatre Record beginning with this issue.
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com