Advice has been circulating among fringe companies about how to appeal to theatre critics. The idea is to dig up some article the critic once wrote and tell them how good it was before you introduce them to your own show.
As someone on the receiving end of these emails, I don’t know how the companies expect me to react. Should I be flattered, intrigued or struck by the coincidence of a play I once saw having something in common with a play they want me to see?
This year, one performer reminded of my feature about a female drug dealer to induce me to see a show about their narcissistic mother; two people told me to see their shows because they liked my 2022 review of Age Is a Feeling; and particularly impressively, someone made the connection between my review of the Chester Mystery Plays and their solo show about addiction.
The technique is as puzzling as it is ineffective (keep it simple, people: just send the press release), even as it emphasises how desperate artists are to make themselves heard above the fringe cacophony.
Amusingly, though, it is an idea Stockport’s Kitsch theatre has taken to the next level. Attachment: The Leech Show is a merry romp about a theatre company whose actors are so beholden to the world’s most influential critic, Bob the Leech, played by writer-director James Allen, that they have custom-built their show for him.
Going on Bob’s past reviews, they have figured out he has a taste for blood, romcoms, Les Misérables, meta theatre and Gandhi – and they duly provide all of those things in a single production. Surely that will earn them a career-changing review.
In black from top to toe, save for his tentacled head, Bob arrives late and rasps his comments in an unintelligible growl. He seems a sensitive sort, bookish and uncomfortable in the spotlight, and gets particularly animated in the blood transfusion scene, the gory spectacle calling to mind the cult movie Theatre of Blood in which actor Edward Lionheart (Vincent Price) murders leading critics in the manner of deaths in Shakespeare’s plays.
Attachment: The Leech Show is funny and chaotic, defying you to take it seriously, but it does identify the industry’s paradoxical attitude to critics. Bob is at once a leech sucking the lifeblood from the theatre and a would-be saviour whose opinion the artists value. The actors are suspended between the simultaneous urge to kill and to flatter – much like the children in Succession and their father, Logan Roy.
Naturally, like so many fictional critics, Bob does not make it to the end of the show. The psychological need for artists to bump off their perceived enemy is hard to resist, even in a production like this that has a relatively benign view of critics (they seemed pleased for me to attend, at any rate).
Death wish or not, the profession owes much of its awareness of theatrical history to the critics who record it as it happens. Worries were expressed before the festival began that too few critics could afford to spend time in Edinburgh. There were also counter-claims that plenty of great critics lived and worked in the city already, thank you very much. Either way, what is left after the last poster has been removed from the festival hoardings is the writing of those who were here to witness it.
That could be a reason for checking out The Courteous Enemy, opening next week, a satire in which 1950s Observer critic Kenneth Tynan, himself a great chronicler, takes issue with the absurdist master Eugène Ionesco.
Attachment: The Leech Show is at Greenside @ Infirmary Street, Edinburgh, until 19 August
