When an unfavourable review recently came out about her new play, Australian director Janine Watson did something she’d never done before. She contacted the reviewer.
Tim Byrne had called her 2022 production of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors “waddling” and “full of errors, but nowhere near enough comedy”. Despite that, she thanked him.
“The review was actually very considered,” Watson says. “It confirmed some niggles.”
Reviews are a necessary evil for some theatremakers, who crave them as much as they fear them. For others, they’re to be ignored at all costs. Guardian Australia spoke to directors, actors and playwrights who had been at the receiving end of a critical pan to find out what happened next.
‘Reviews can take my attention off the show’
For Watson – who was a Bell Shakespeare actor before she became a director – it depends on which hat she’s wearing.
“If I’m acting, I don’t read reviews – good or bad,” she says. “They take my attention off the show.” As a director, though, she always seeks them out: “Because some actors read them, and I want to know what they’re feeling,” she says. “You can see it in them when they’ve read a bad review.”
In the case of The Comedy of Errors, she knew the show wasn’t quite finished before it left Melbourne to tour. “There were no previews – we were straight on the road,” she says.
Byrne’s review was so “smart, incisive and honest” that Watson asked him what further insights he had. As a result, when the show reached Sydney, Watson trimmed the first half and changed the tempo in places, so it was sharper to better support the comedy.
Byrne tells the Guardian Australia that Watson’s note was “the most professional, mature and considered response I’ve had to a review in a long time. She saw it as a dialogue with her practice, a wrestling with the work that sharpens her own skills.”
This is highly unusual, Byrne says.
“I don’t think the critic’s role is to improve an individual work, or teach or even judge the quality of art,” Byrne says. “The critic’s role is to contextualise, to extend and perhaps … to deepen the conversation around art.”
‘It was very hard to walk back into the theatre the next night’
Whether acting or directing, Mitchell Butel reads all reviews. He finds all worthwhile if the critic has done their job of “neither praising nor blaming, but interrogating whether the intended message of the theatremaker has been communicated.”
He doesn’t share them backstage, though: he knows others prefer to avoid reviews.
He still remembers verbatim the lashings received by 2007’s The Madwoman of Chaillot; a production which he acted in, that “disappoints on so many levels it’s difficult to know where to begin,” (the Age) and that left another reviewer having “never left the theatre feeling so empty” (the Australian.)
“It seems funny now, but it was very hard to walk back into the theatre the next night,” Butel says.
It could have been worse, he says.
“For that particular play, we kind of knew the production hadn’t quite clicked. It’s more disappointing when everybody has worked very hard doing the best possible work they could, yet still the critic doesn’t agree.”
It’s rare, Butel says, that changes will be made to the production if its creators truly believe they have followed their intended path. “Ultimately my allegiance is to the writer and director, and the vision we’ve created together,” he says, advising his peers to “develop a thick skin and appreciate every opinion is subjective”.
Nevertheless, he can think of two instances in which reviews affected his work. Counterintuitively, it was the excellent review that was less helpful than the bad one.
The reviewer said Butel’s depiction of grief over his character’s dead son in the 2008 Brisbane production of Stones in His Pockets was one of the most acutely observed and sensitive moments he’d seen on stage.
“I loved myself a bit for getting that review,” Butel says. “And I got to that moment the following night and the tears didn’t come – I couldn’t find the emotion within me; hubris got in the way. It took me a few shows to get back to the truth of the moment, and away from that self-consciousness.”
Meanwhile, Jason Blake’s review of Butel’s performance in 2010’s The Grenade as “stuck in one gear” – that gear being “caffeinated” – proved more helpful. It led him to adjust his performance.
“The next night I thought: I might just take that down a little bit, maybe pop a Valium,” he says laughing.
‘We changed the play – and I took further acting lessons’
Blake had a similar effect on actor Yannick Lawry in his 2016 performance of The Screwtape Letters; his review suggested Lawry failed to make a complete connection with his fellow actor or audience.
“It stopped short of saying the show was boring – but it hit hard,” Lawry says. “[So] we worked on the characterisation and added a direct address of the audience.” And the actor took some further classes, too, to build more connection into his craft.
Blake says he would be surprised if this was often the case.
“Reviewers don’t write up a show with the intention of submitting director’s notes,” he says. “As a rule, a show is what it is by opening night.
“Productions do evolve over the course of the season, but that’s almost always the result of performers experiencing in-the-moment feedback from the audience.”
‘It was brutal’
Saro Lusty-Cavallari’s first production of The Great Australian Play was given a “brutal” review by Van Badham in the Guardian, but in pitching another run of it at the Old Fitz recently, the director “owned rather than hid from” what he calls the “most high-profile review of my career.”
When quotes from Badham’s review appeared on the deck during the presentation pitching the play to the theatre for a new season, “sad music was played to show the same self-deprecating humour you’ll find in the play”.
The production’s second season even referenced the review in the script.
“The play itself is very meta, and is about the failure of making art,” Lusty-Cavallari says. “We mainly stuck to a similar script, but we did write in a line about receiving ‘the worst review of our careers’ – a reference to Badham’s critical pan.”
Negative reviews can torment playwrights years after publication.
Playwright Melanie Tait’s first show, The Vegemite Tales, garnered a haunting review: one star in the Scotsman at the Edinburgh festival.
“It was devastating,” Tait says.
Despite the play selling out in London and Edinburgh, that one review, Tait says, “didn’t help me, or spur me on. It just backed up my immature notions of being worthless and a rubbish artist.”
Even today, thinking about it makes her anxious. “I was 23. I didn’t write another play until I was 38. I’m 42 now – it kept me away from doing the work that fills my soul for nearly 20 years. I was just so embarrassed.”
Returning, as she did, to playwriting, has vindicated her path.
Her critically acclaimed play The Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race is currently being filmed for one of the major streaming services.
“I’m still pretty terrified of reviews,” she says, but adds, “I don’t attach my worth as an artist to critiques quite as much. If a company wants to program my play, an audience wants to see it and is moved by it, and tells their friends to see it? That’s the review I care most about.”
