John Lazarus was born and raised in Montreal, graduated from the National Theatre School and moved to Vancouver in 1970. After thirty years working there as an actor, radio copywriter, critic, playwright, screenwriter and teacher, including ten years teaching at Studio 58, John has just moved to Kingston, Ontario to join the faculty at Queen's University. The dance/drama production, ICE: beyond cool, for which he wrote the script, goes on a national tour this Fall, and a film version will be broadcast as a CBC Television special this Winter. He is currently writing a school touring show for the Vancouver Chamber Choir, and a new play called Singed, and preparing his screenplay, Meeting Your Maker, for possible production in B.C. next Summer.

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Chick Snipper

John Lazarus

Deborah Dunn

Mavor Moore

Peter Birnie

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"When have a critic's comments had a positive impact on your work?"

Never.

That's really all I have to say, but I've been asked for up to a thousand words, so I will now take advantage of the space to ramble on a bit about critics and those they criticize.

My experience has been on both sides of this issue. For over a decade I worked as a theatre critic for a number of Vancouver newspapers and radio and TV stations. Like some of Vancouver's present theatre critics, I came to the discipline from having worked in the theatre myself. And as an actor and playwright, I read reviews of my work (and read "read" in both the present and past tenses) with only one concern: will this review sell tickets?

All right, that's not the whole truth. In the case of those critics for whom I've had some respect, I read their reviews in the same spirit with which I might accost a knowledgeable and honest friend who had seen my play, and say, "All right, tell me what you really think." But if one is lucky, one has several such knowledgeable and honest friends in the biz. The fact that one of them happens to be a theatre critic, and expresses his/her opinion in the public press, rather than over a quiet drink after the show, does not make that opinion pre-eminent.

So when I started work as a critic, I was under relatively few delusions that I would have anything to teach my colleagues in the theatre world. However, I was startled to discover that some of my fellow-critics - especially those with the least amount of hands-on experience - actually imagined theatre artists eagerly reading their reviews for advice on how to improve their work. One local reviewer in the 1980's, a very strange and self-important young man, was in the deplorable habit of going backstage after performances and giving notes to the actors! - until one night when an actor punched him out in a dressing room, and he got fired. This is the critic's delusion raised, or lowered, to the level of a psychosis.

My idea of a bad critic is typified by another regrettable character from the 1980's Vancouver scene. (For those who rankle at our current crop of critics, let me just say that it's been worse.) This guy used to derive genuine, discernible sadistic pleasure out of giving bad reviews. At one year's end he knocked off one of those dreary articles that critics seem to love to write about what they look for in a play and how they make their judgements, as if anybody cared. (I've written a couple of those myself. I guess maybe this is sort of one of them.) Anyway, in that article he wrote, "When a play is unremittingly terrible, that's when it's time to have some fun with it" - or words to that effect. I thought that summed it up. My own attitude was, and is, that when a play is unremittingly terrible, that's when it's the critic's job to get serious and explore what went wrong and how it could be fixed. It's when a play is startlingly good that a critic should go to town and have some fun. (The great art critic Lord Kenneth Clarke once said that the chief function of a critic is to stand beside a masterpiece and make noises.)

I think that perhaps the Let's-Have-Fun-With-This-Turkey attitude derives from confusing the intent of small-scale Canadian theatre with the intent of large-scale Hollywood blockbusters. I believe that when a small Canadian play doesn't work, it fails with the best of intentions - unlike large-budget American movies and TV shows that fail because they are cynically produced. Of course, when a multi-gazillion-dollar L.A. explosion-fest doesn't work, the movie critic should go after it with all knives out and whirling. But the Canadian theatre critic who adopts that attitude can do real harm to the livelihoods of people who are doing their best and who, often as not, are failing out of a lack of experience. That is not to say that the Canadian theatre critic should necessarily cut the well-meaning theatrical failure any extra slack. I get as angry as anybody at discovering, ten minutes into a turkey, that I have wasted my time and money on amateur work with pretensions of professionalism. So, yes, a critic should criticize - constructively, not with a thirst for blood.

In ten to fifteen years of reviewing, I had one shining moment when a theatre director told me that a review of mine had made him re-think, and rework, a part of his play. And I was very honoured by that moment. But the odds are greatly against that sort of thing happening. After all, the playwright lives with the work for two years, the director for two months, the actors for two weeks (or more, if they're lucky) - and the critic for only two hours. The critic who thinks that his/her rushed response to that two-hour experience is going to show the cast and crew something they'd missed is living in a dream world.

What gets really depressing is the fact that after a while one cannot even enjoy the good reviews. As Simon Callow notes in his brilliant book Being an Actor, "There are actors who claim not to read reviews; there are even actors who really don't. Personally I read them all avidly and with rising fury, whether they're good or bad. It's the feeling of being on trial that evokes the bile: that, and their power... Needless to say, the only interest in a review is whether it's a selling review." Of course it's "needless to say" - to theatre workers. It's only critics who dream that they have any more influence than that.