Chapter 15 – Viewpoints

VLADIMIR: Moron! ESTRAGON: Vermin! VLADIMIR: Abortion! ESTRAGON: Morpion! VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!ESTRAGON: Curate!VLADIMIR: Cretin!ESTRAGON: (with finality)Crritic!

—Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Chapter Summary

• Critics often add fresh dimensions to our awareness and appreciation of theatre.

• They acquaint readers and audiences with both good and bad productions.

• At best, they hope to connect the truly good work with audiences and to preserve it for future generations.

Criticism

• Two kinds of criticism:– Drama criticism:

• Comments on written text from literary and cultural-historical-theoretical perspective

– Theatre criticism (theatre reviewing):• Deals with plays-in-performance

• Critics are real force:– Critic from New York Times has power to close a

show with a bad review.

Audience as Critic

• Watching a play raises questions:

– Is the world a stage?

– Were the actors convincing?

– Were costumes appropriate?

– Were sound effects too loud?

• Audiences are critics (they express opinions).

• Audiences bring at least four viewpoints to theatre:

– Human significance

– Social significance

– Artistic qualities

– Entertainment value

Audience Viewpoints

• Human significance:– Theatre connects audiences with common humanity.– Explores what it means to be human beings.

• Social significance:– Theatre has inherent relationship to society:

• Audience = community.– Theatre serves as an arena for discussing social and

political issues.

Audience Viewpoints

• Entertainment:– Great theatre is always entertaining in some way.– Even tragedy delights:

• Catharsis• Thrills (ghosts, witches, murders, etc.)

– Theatre is a source of pleasure.• Aesthetic significance:

– We know what we like and what we don’t like.– As we see more theatre, we develop a deeper

awareness of sights, words, characters, actions, actors, sounds, and colors.

The Professional Critic:The Critic’s Job

• Reviews published in morning newspaper following official opening-night performance.

• Stanley Kauffmann: critic is “a kind of para-reality to the theatre’s reality”:– Criticism should be good, whether it’s about good or

bad theatre.• Power and, often, hostility of critics creates backlash:

– Checkhov: critics are “horse flies . . . buzzing about anything.”

The Professional Critic: Services Performed by Critics

• Recognize and preserve works of good artists for future generations

• Publicists of the good and the bad:– Separate wheat from chaff

• Help public decide which productions to see• Serve as mediators between artists and audiences• Serve as historians:

– Criticism as record of theatrical times

The Professional Critic: The Critic’s Creativity

• Are critics more than failed artists?– Good criticism sometimes written by second-rate

artists– George Bernard Shaw expert critic, expert playwright

• Criticism a talent:– Combines artistic sensibility, writing skill, insight,

knowledge of theatre• Stanley Kauffmann: critic’s creativity is “the imaginative

rendering of experience in such a way that it can be essentially experienced by others.”

The Professional Critic:The Critic’s Questions

• What is the playwright trying to do?

• How well has he or she done it?

• Was it worth doing?

A Scene from Seven Guitars by August Wilson

(c) Patrick B

ennett /C

ourtesy Seattle R

epertory Theatre

The Professional Critic:Performance Notes

• Several journals publish critical descriptions of distinguished productions.

• Provide records of productions.• Offer impressions of trends in avant-garde theatre.

The Professional Critic:Theatre Scholarship

• Majority of critics are university teachers and/or professional dramaturgs.

• They analyze plays and productions within rigorously researched critical contexts.

• Scholarly critics ordinarily write with a comprehensive knowledge of a specific subject:– Playwright– Performance theories and practice– Historical period– Intercultural and/or gender studies

The Professional Critic:Theatre Scholarship

• Works of great writers of dramatic criticism can be of lasting literary value:– Aristotle’s Poetics– Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the

Human• New critical methodologies draw from variety of

disciplines:– Linguistics– Semiotics– Structuralism– Deconstructionism

The Professional Critic:Critical Standards

• Developed after years of viewing theatre.• Best critics remain open and flexible.• Critic and director Harold Clurman:

– Whether the critic is good or bad doesn’t depend on his opinions but on the reasons he can offer for those opinions.

Working Critics

• Brooks Atkinson on Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire:– Wrote two reviews:

• After opening night• Ten days later

– Both reviews:• Streetcar didn’t address social issues.• Solved no problems.• Arrived at no moral conclusions.• It was a work of art—audience sat “in presence of

truth.”

Working Critics

• Brooks Atkinson on Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire:– Organization of second review:

• Deals first with play’s truthfulness • Williams’ “poetic language” • Kazan’s directing and Mielziner’s scenic details• Performances of the actors• Williams’ career

Core Concepts

• For the professional critic, the play in performance is the end product of the theatre’s creative process.

• At best, the critic enhances our understanding of the production or theatre event by enabling us to read about the theatrical experience from a perspective other than our own or that of our friends.

• Theatre criticism—carefully weighed by the reader—adds a new dimension to the discovery and understanding of theatre.