Theatre criticism notes

Course: CT 115 Play Production
Theatrical Criticism Arthur Dirks
Course Index
Main Index
Print This Page

Criticism in the Theatre
Forms of Criticism
Conditions of Criticism
Responding Process
Handles for the Critic
Writing the Review
Critical Approaches
Collected lecture/discussion notes. Some parts are very fragmented, but offered here as a study aid, not a primary learning source. Citations noted where available.

Forms of Criticism
Difference between review and critique:
Review: Primarily a report; and immediate, journalistic response.
Critique: In depth, an evaluation, scholarly response.

FOUR TYPES:
Newspaper
Magazine
Television
Scholarly analysis

Functions:
News
Impression
Values
Education
Feedback to artists
Social Commentary
Shaping the art form (encourage, discourage, educate, feedback)

Conditions of Criticism
"Audience completes the event; theatre exists because an audience agrees to let it exist."

Critic's role:

-Reviewers give report, write for deadline, are interested in matters of taste and reaction. Part of market - consumer's guide.
-Critic deals with play in relation to tradition of theatre, art, culture, and acts as intereter of new statements, preparing audience expectations (Have you ever seen or heard a piece, rejected it, read about it, appreciated it?).

Audience expectations:

-Expect play to be related to life experience; authentic representation of some aspect of life as we know it.
-Expect resolution and satisfaction in conclusions that is not found in life. We like theatre to be not like life.
-Awareness of other audience members; expectation of collective, shared response.
-Expect presentation in a manner and form it is used to.
-Expectations based upon previous theatrical experiences, which include movies and video, high school musicals and community theatre. Formulas succeed because of this joy in repetition of form, predictability.
-Also want to be surprised, moved, exhilarated.

Theatre's response:

-"Playwright has an equally legitimate right to fulfill the truth of his or her vision as it is re-created in theatrical form, even if it means violating the audience's expectations."
-"On the one hand the playwright gives the audience what it wants. On the other, the playwright must be true to his or her own vision of reality."
-Box office theatre clearly is intended to satisfy audience expectations, not challenge them. Dinner theatre, community theatre, Broadway, etc.

Audience Reaction:

-Playwrights provoke new awareness through shock and beguilement: Beguiles by being furtively attractive, has unrestrained evocative power. Shocks by confronting deeply-held taboos.
-Much audience seeks escape, evasion, diversion. Eventually means a lack of challenge to expectations, lack of shock and beguilement. They leave piece to be forgotten. Temporary satisfactions.
-Masterpieces outlive ephemeral works through truthfullness, provocation.

Theatre mirrors society:

-Playwright and artists very sensitive to new directions in man's transaction with the rest of the world.
-If playwright will provoke new views he must beguile us through truth.
-New directions often due to discovery of truth that cannot be expressed in old forms.

Avant Garde

-Deliberate attempt to upset the audience expectations.
-History of artistic change is punctuated by violent violations of expectations. Especially in 20th Century, including many now-accepted modes.
-Successful avant-garde in turn becomes mainstream and provokes new avant garde reaction.

Brocket: " a play may be deemed successful if it achieves the desired response from the audience for which it was primarily intended." Questions failure of activist drama to activate unconvinced.

Also:
-Respond to theatre non judgementally. Try to open up - don't judge or apply standards, but "read" what transpires. Reading imputes meaning to symbols or behavior. Afterwards, evaluate what you have "read".

Responding process:
Respond > describe > evaluate
Evaluation cannot occur while responding fully to a work. Response requires openness to stimuli, openness to associations and connections, and openness to the operation of the work itself.

Description creates the ground for evaluation, and is often more important.

Respond > Describe > Analyze > Interpret > Evaluate
Best approach to creative works.

Sensory > Formal > Expressive > Technical > Critical


Process for pulling together ideas and descriptive order.


Some Handles for the Critic

Analyzing a Play
What is the core emotional experience of the play?
What are the key images, the metaphors, in the play?
What are the main character relationships in the play,(i.e. father-son, master-slave, victimizer-victimized, etc). Hint: go deeper than the obvious.
What is the basic structure of the play? (I.E. is the play a series of vignettes, or does it follow a time and space sequential arrangement). As you know, plays may be classified structurally as both episodic and climactic according to different characteristics.

What are the key themes of the play?
What is the playwright's vision of reality?
Based on the responses to all of the above, what do you think is the meaning of the play?

Writing the Theatre Review

Barranger, Milly S. Theatre: A Way of Seeing. Fourth edition. New York: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1995. Pp. 360-363.

Assess:
Human significance
Social significance
Aesthetic significance
Entertainment values
Critics questions:
What was the Artist trying to do?
How well has he or she done it?
Was it worth doing?


Although there is no general agreement on criteria for judging a performance, the first step in writing theatre criticism is the ability to see. If we can describe what we see in the theatre, then we can begin to arrive at critical judgments. The play or production or both determines the approach - the structure of the review and the critical priorities. If the staging justifies a detailed account of what we observe, then the review incorporates a great deal of description. However, what we see in the theatre must connect with the play's meaning. For this reason, all theatre criticism involves both description and evaluation.

Since theatre is something perceived by the audience, writing about performance should be based on sensory impressions. As audiences, we are exposed to many significant details, sounds, and images, and only from them do we derive concepts or abstract meanings. Because we build critical concepts on the foundation of our perceptions, we can begin the process of seeing theatre critically by learning to describe our perceptions. A model for a theatre review written according to this method might take the following form (see Figure 14.3):

Heading or logo
Substance or meaning of play
Select and prioritize these elements:

Setting or environment
Acting (actor and character)
Language
Stage business
Directing Costumes
Lighting and sound effects
Other significant human details

In writing any commentary it is necessary, first, to identify the performance to be discussed. Brooks Atkinson identifies both-play and playwright in the first paragraph of his review of A Streetcar Named Desire. Frank Rich of the New York Times identifies actress, play, and playwright in the two short opening paragraphs of his review of Rockaby. Margaret Croyden identifies the Hindu poem and the clashing dynasties in Peter Brook's nine-hour production of The Mahabharata for the New York Times.

Next, commentary on the play's substance or meaning informs the reader about the playwright's particular perspective on human affairs. Third, the performance involves what J. L. Styan calls "an environment of significant stimuli": sights, sounds, color, light, movement, space. These stimuli can be described by answering questions related to setting, costumes, sound, lighting, acting, and stage business. Is the stage environment open or closed, symbolic or realistic? What are the effects of the stage shape on the actor's speech, gesture, and movement? Is the lighting symbolic or suggestive of realistic light sources? What details of color, period, taste, and socioeconomic status are established by the costumes? What use is made of music and sound or light effects? What details separate the actor-at-work from his or her character-in-situation? What do the characters do in the play's action? What stage properties do the actors use and how are they significant? Finally, what visual and aural images of human experience and society develop during the performance? How effective are they!


Critical Approaches:

Textual-linguistic:
-Concentrates on the accuracy of the historical aspects of the source materials. In the case of literature and some kinds of theatre, it is the authenticity of the text. In the case of music, it may be the authenticity of the score and the interpretation of the markings. A similar case may be made for reconstructions of choreography, or other historic or folk-derived dance.

Historical-Biographical:
-Sees a work chiefly, if not exclusively, as a reflection of its author’s life and times, or the life and times of the characters in the work.


Expressive:
-Generally a product of the Romantics, considers artwork as a source of unique knowledge deriving from the imagination and, therefor, glorifies "self expression" as the true function of art.

Moral-Philosophical:
-Larger function of literature is to teach morality. Purely aesthetic considerations are secondary.
Formalistic:

-Object is to find the key to the structure and meaning of the work. "What is the literary work, what are its shape and effect, and how do these come about?"

-Search for a unifying pattern from hints and clues — it informs or shapes the work inwardly and gives its parts a relevance to the whole and vice versa. (New Criticism of 30s and 40s)
-Objected to matters outside the work for interpretation.
-Seeks meaning of everything and all allusions.
-Seeks point of view.
Psychological:
-Limitation is its aesthetic inadequacy; augments other approaches.
-Tendency to interpret all images in terms of sexuality.
Mythological and Archetypal approaches:
-The myth critic is concerned to seek out those mysterious artifacts built into certain literary "form" which elicit, with almost uncanny force, dramatic and universal human reactions."
-Close connection to the psychological approach.
-Myths are the symbolic projections of a people’s hopes, values, fears, and aspirations. Collective and communal. Not surface reality — more profound — archetypes - images that elicit comparable psychological responses: Images: Water, sun colors, circle, woman, wind, ship, garden, desert; Motifs/patterns: creation immortality heroes.
Exponential:
-Following themes; Recognition of images and symbols woven into patterns as motifs. "any interpretation must be supported logically and fully from the evidence within a literary work and that the ultimate test of the validity of an interpretation must be its self-consistency."
Also:

Sociological / Marxist:
-Examines all images and other aspects of the artwork for their assumptions about social order and class.
Linguistic:
-Semantics, meaning, the meaning of meaning. Usually characterized by a basis in semiotics.
Impressionistic / Appreciative
-Highly subjective responses of the viewer/audience member. Often reduces critique to personal taste.
Conventional / Aristotelian:
-Greatest concern, beyond all other values, for the degree to which the work adheres to existing prescriptions and conventions.




All non-original content used by permission.
All original content protected by copyright © Arthur L. Dirks, Taunton, MA., 1995-2000.

Please send comments to the designer Arthur Dirks
Last updated on 03/07/2005 23:17:55
Go to BSC Home

Send me an e-mail

Or click here to visit my private website.

LEARNING MODULE SCRIPTWRITING BELOW

Television - Comedy


Site Navigation
New

Film

Radio
© Robin Kelly 1997 - 2003

Sitcom Writing
Part 1

This is the most difficult area for a new writer to break into. Writing sitcoms is a highly specialised craft: plots need to be watertight, well structured and unpredictable, characters believable, appealing and contemporary and the dialogue funny and original. So don't expect immediate success - even established writers have difficulty placing projects.

If you've never written a sitcom before, it might help you to tape episodes of your favourite series and watch them a few times, noting the scene structure, story development, frequency of laughs and the balance of verbal and visual jokes. Force yourself to watch sitcoms you don't like and note why you don't like them and ensure you don't make the same mistakes.

I would also recommend reading sitcom scripts and going to see an episode being recorded. The BBC Ticket Unit is one source. Also there are now courses and books on writing sitcoms.

Audience and transmission time

Before you start you may want to have in your mind what time slot and channel you're aiming at. A pre-watershed show for BBC1 is invariably going to have a different style and tone to a post-watershed show for Channel 4.

Theme

Every sitcom should have a theme. It doesn't have to be a large theme like the "futility of existence"; it can be much smaller. With the Vicar of Dibley the theme is "a person can make a difference". It could be a personally observed relationship type theme. The theme of the Cosby show is "family life is great". The theme of Married..with Children (working title: Not the Cosbys) is "family life is hell". It's important that your show is consistent and the audience is clear what it's about. I like Father Ted and I like dinnerladies but I wouldn't watch a show that mixed those styles. Inconsistency of style is a common reason for the rejection of scripts.

Character

Situation comedy should really be called 'character comedy': the laughs come from the reaction of your characters to that situation. It's not about one-liners and gags strung together. Neil Simon, one of the funniest writers ever, claims to have never written a joke.

Good writing, whether it is for comedy or drama is reliant on strong character outlines. Use characters that you know you can sustain and who are believable and interesting. Then make sure that those characters have an identity of their own.

A common misconception is that character comedy equals subtle shows like The Royle Family not something like Bottom. But even in Bottom Ade and Rich have clearly delineated characterisations which act as a springboard for the story and gags.

Another common misconception is that it's the actors who create characters and simply adding "to be played by David Jason" next to a name is all a writer has to do. It can be helpful to write a rôle with an actor in mind but creating characters is the writer's job. A script with under developed characters wouldn't even get as far as David Jason's agent.

Some writers feel they have to base their characters on real life and experience but comedy isn't real life. A real person can inspire you, as a Torquay hotel manager inspired John Cleese and Connie Booth to create Basil Fawlty, but you have to be true to your show and not true to life. All because a character really exists it doesn't make them funny.

I like to do a full character breakdown. I make a grid with all the names of the characters at the top and a list of physical, sociological and psychological attributes (taken from Linda Segar's book Creating Unforgettable Characters). As I fill in the grid I can ensure that the people will contrast sufficiently to show up each other's traits and attitudes clearly.

There has to be conflict between the characters. If one character is stupid enough to support Aston Villa then the other character should support Birmingham City. But the set up of the conflict has to be believable. I can believe a Villa fan and a Blues fan sharing a flat but I would have difficulty believing God and Satan sharing a flat.

Try to keep the number of characters in your script to a sensible number. Most sitcoms succeed because they focus on no more than four central characters with a small supporting cast. Whilst it is important for you to know your characters and their world inside and out, there is no need to send in detailed character descriptions along with your script. What your character is like should come out in the dialogue and the story.


I think it's more important to have interesting characters we haven't seen before than it is to have a premise we haven't seen before. I would recommend working through Matthew Carless' guide to Creating Comedy Characters before going any further with your script.