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A Critic's Work on Himself

On a midsummer's night last year I stood after the last dying gasp of Bard on the Beach's Macbeth so a colleague and his family could exit, lawn left. "More melodrama than drama," he sniffed as he passed, certain this profundity from a fellow bleacherling would form the geist of my review.

"Of course it was bloody melodrama," I thought to myself. "We're sitting in an open-ended circus tent beside a parking lot next to English Bay, watching a cast gathered from across Vancouver's acting spectrum struggle with a mysticism-cluttered text and Bell-jet helicopters buzzing the battlements. You were expecting maybe RSC at the Barbican?"

It never ceases to amaze me how much baggage audience members bring to the theatre. Whether it's daily woes manifest in a squirmy inability to sit quietly and pay attention or a deeper problem in obsessing on the performance not as it is but as they think it should be, too many people arrive unable to simply give themselves up to what will unfold. Those purists who can stand nothing less than Ibsen in idiomatic Norwegian or Moliere in full-court Parisian should remember that Shakespeare is never better than when read silently to one's self; while we can all dream of a theatre where each work in the canon is realized through a flawlessly plummy cast and director faithfully rendering all the Bard's stage directions, the fact is he gave none, or so few that we've been trying ever since to figure out what was intended before his early editors got their gauntlets on that first folio. Few directors can resist the lure of doing some form of the Bard: fewer still are the actors not itching to show the world a TV Mountie can also be a doleful Dane. The resultant riot of styles and sensibilities should be seen as amusing rather than insulting, and until an international moratorium is called to halt every lesbian Lear or misguided attempt to make Love's Labour's Lost a jolly musical, then we can only cross our fingers as we take our seats.

But why try to plant asses in the wrong seats? Some shows are beyond help, and I try to be as civil as possible in saying so. Other offerings are so stale and dated that it's obvious the artistic director is simply trying to pay the bills by relying on the core audience, older and less likely to want challenges. Don't get me started on the lazy way we seem to be willing to shuffle off to be mildly amused by such non-offensive fluff as Swing, The Odd Couple, A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline or The Foursome (oh, for the Athens of old, where tens of thousands would turn out with Bacchanalian fervor to hear the latest Sophocles piece and vigorously debate whether or not he'd take the judges' prize again), and stop me from descending into a tiresome rant against the way Internet porno, video-game violence and the numbing stupidity of Hollywood are destroying our ability to interact creatively.

Instead allow me to invoke the memory of much-maligned Konstantin Stanislavsky. As he predicted, generations of actors were tripped up by misinterpretation of his teachings, especially the find-that-bead loopiness of emotional memory, and no less and adversary than Anton Chekhov grew royally pissed with the way Stanislavsky and his Moscow Art Theatre kept trying to crank up the action in Three Sisters. Yet much of An Actor's Work on Himself remains an important guide to understanding yourself on stage, and so for the benefit of readers and theatre companies alike, I propose an equivalent for those of us paid to plant our butts in the dark across the proscenium. If we dare sit in judgment of what occurs across that gap, then let us apply the same rigorous standards by which actors, riggers, dressers and all the other professionals weigh themselves. A Critic's Work on Himself (or, in the case of Jo, Leanne and others, Herself) would call on us to arrive at the theatre in a relaxed state of readiness, with clear head and clear purpose. We have not just eaten a big meal, or had too much wine with it, and are ready to pay the fullest possible attention. We have not prejudged a production based on other versions we've seen, especially if the extent of one's experience with the complex characters of Tennessee Williams is to have seen Treat Williams, Anne Margaret and Beverly D'Angelo in that abysmal TV Streetcar. We have avoided listening to backstage gossip about production problems and who bitch-slapped whom, we carry no torch for or grudge against anyone named in the programme, even if it's that pompous pedant George Bernard Shaw, and if this is a new work or one unfamiliar to us we will restrict our reading about it to the general pleasantries in that programme. We will especially resist the urge to read a new script beforehand, knowing it can only lead one to wander into the dangerous territory of "what if" or, to be more accurate, "why didn't they ask ME to direct?"

We will sit in the equivalent of an actor's "public solitude," a member of the audience who does not crinkle wrappers, flip pages in a notebook or creak open those little water bottles they give away to the suits at a Playhouse opening night. We will be as ready as any intelligent audience member to tell someone quietly and politely to shut the hell up (remembering that to grab someone's cell-phone away from them constitutes assault) and will take advantage of the intermission to report to an usher the specifics of who should have a good talking-to on How To Behave At the Theatre. We will be generous in our applause and willing to endure such destruction of the fourth wall as the singalong portion of a pantomime, but will refuse to bow to peer pressure in a standing ovation, rising only if it's justified.

When we write, we'll strive like Stanislavsky's actors not to be a hack or imitative, but a creative critic whose indirect and unconscious link to the actors on stage translates into a direct and conscious link with readers. We will enjoy citing the given circumstances of what we saw unfold on stage (as opposed to just reciting the plot) as much as the cast and crew enjoyed presenting it to us, and if they didn't then we'll say so. Our readers should comment over their coffee that our reviews are not only an informed and helpful guide to whether or not a production is worth catching, but lively pieces of entertainment in themselves. Implicit in reviews of all but the basest of dross should be a sense of the excitement still to be found in so much of theatre, as we encourage people to come out of their shells and realize this beautiful invalid still packs the potential to be an important social force and not merely dumb-show.

We must know this art form, while never presuming to think we know it all. Whether the facile exchanges between Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are seen for what they are, pale imitations of Beckett's Didi and Gogo on their path to salvation, or Canadian playwrighting is decried for an increasing cowardice we'll be ready to sacrifice sacred cows if it helps steer theatre away from the morass of mediocrity always threatening.

Above all, let's get the hell out of town now and then to experience life beyond this idyllic snow-dome with no snow. "A true artist is inspired by everything that takes place around him," Stanislavsky wrote. "Life excites him and becomes the object of his study and his passion; he eagerly observes all he sees and tries to imprint it on his memory not as a statistician, but as an artist, not only in his notebook, but also in his heart. It is, in short impossible to work in art in a detached way. We must possess a certain degree of inner warmth; we must have sensuous attention. That does not mean, however, that we must renounce our reason, for it is possible to reason warmly, and not coldly."

Six weeks in Mexico sure helped me find my sensuous reason recently, as I followed a fascinating presidential election through silver-mining towns and beach resorts. Now if I can just resist turning those secret tunnels under Zacatecas into a screenplay....

email: pbirnie@pacpress.southam.ca