I don’t rate Les Misérables. If you read my review, (or at least the one by
Abi Taulbat, my Hebrew alter-ego!) in last Monday’s (10th August)
West Australian you’ll be aware of this, It’s pompous, pretentious and ripe for a bit of mickey-taking. Fortunately, it’s also a ‘critic-proof’ musical, and as such the MS society of WA need not fear that my lightly satirical response will damage their box office returns. ‘Les Mis’ is a Titan, a broad-shouldered bouncer at the nightclub door of its more fragile cousins – those poor but exciting innovators of the Blue Room (Jeffrey Jay Fowler, Tim Watts and Alexa Taylor for example).
It’s big enough and ugly enough to take the odd knock back I think.
Given that my job is to offer opinion and dish out judgement on the work of Perth theatre creatives, it surprises me that more people don’t exercise their right of reply. Only 3 times have there been letters of response where readers have queried my views – naturally always for productions that did not receive positive reviews; no one has ever taken issue with a rave.
A while ago, ‘disgruntled theatre-goer of Peppermint Grove’ voiced objections when I suggested that Black Swan’s Cyrano de Bergerac was not up to much. They said ‘the entire audience I’m sure found it thoroughly entertaining’. He/she goes on to praise the ‘enormous effort’ of the whole cast adding that, ‘the arts in Perth should be encouraged and supported as much as possible’.
Similarly, ‘outraged theatre patron of Subiaco’ was convinced that my views on the woeful Doctors dot Com were the result of a ‘personal vendetta against someone or all of those involved in the play.’ Again they make the plea to ‘support and encourage our local writers and actors, not destroy them.’
Believe it or not, I welcome feedback, I don’t get very much of it. There are very few theatre critics in Perth and the wellbeing of the theatre industry depends upon us all airing our honest views about what’s what.
If the people who take pains to write into the letters page are indeed regular theatre lovers without professional connections to the industry then one can understand their misaprehensions about the function of criticism. My view is that critics are not there to represent the majority audience opinion and most would never dare to suggest they could. We are also, and this will be a surprise to some theatre producers and audience members, not a part of the marketing team. ‘[critics] contribute to debate and discussion about the arts’ says the UK Guardian newspaper’s theatre critic Michael Billington.
When you attend as many stage performances as I do, it’s an automatic response to compare each new experience with a long-standing and evolving history of theatrical output. That for me includes not just Perth in the past 5 years but some of Broadway and London’s finest practitioners. This contextualising enables me to be sufficiently detached and objective. This doesn’t make me a perfect theatre critic, but it gives me my individual perspective.
Let’s have some intelligent and sensible professional discourse about Perth theatre. By all means question my opinions; illuminate and explain if you think I appear not to be understanding the intentions of a piece. I beg you though to stop believing that I am unaware of the efforts that are behind theatre production or that I am anything but one of Perth’s most enthusiastic and passionate supporters of theatre arts.
As A A Gill concludes after noting that ‘Critics are culture’s traffic wardens.’ ‘If you want to be loved work with puppies.’
I urge you to take a look at Alison Croggon’s wonderful blog
theatre notes and pick out the link label: ‘criticism’. As ever she engages in her usual intelligent manner on the subject of criticism. It’s a very topical issue here and among the UK pundits, well worth getting in on the debate.
