Confessions of an Itinerant Critic

Confessions of an Itinerant Critic Rustom Bharucha VLADIMIR: Moron! ESTRAGON: Vermin! VLADIMIR: Abortion! ESTRAGON: Morpion! VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat! ESTRAGON: Curate! VLADIMIR: Cretin! ESTRAGON: (with finality). Crritic! (Waiting for Godot) Self-Accusation Critics are, not infrequently, cretins. Theatre critics, in particular. They sit in judgment at opening night and pronounce verdicts that frequently have nothing to do with the play. Many reviews, one feels, have been written even before the curtain has risen. Or else, put together in some kind of drunken stupor hours after a performance. Why then this importance given to critics? What makes them different from other spectators? Knowledge, a way with words, disinterestedness, taste ... qualities, more imagined than real, that conjure up the perfect critic who does not exist. There are some serious critics, of course, who view their task with high seriousness. Stalwarts of the tradition, they dutifully impose functions on themselves as guardians of society and arbiters of taste. Fastidious pundits , culture watchers, etc. Imagine them sitting in the solitude of their studies, Apollonian, recollecting in tranquillity the distillations of last night's performance. Self-consciously detached from the activity of theatre, its grit and sleaze, they offer discreet, and ultimately omniscient, critiques of productions that are more literary than theatrical in perspective. 9 Enough of these accusations. I'm not a critic, I plead, just a writer who has criticized on occasion. Equivocator, I hear Estragon snarl. I submit that there are many deceptions involved in writing criticism. 1. Criticism is an objective scrutiny of facts. It can't be personal, though it may be (and frequently is) opinionated. 2. Criticism is not creative. It does not have a life of its own. Its function is to remain faithful to what has already been written. 3. Criticism is logical. It can't go off on tangents or circumlocute or digress. 4. Criticism is serious business. It should help us to live, and therefore, it cannot tolerate any play of thought. At best, it can be, as Eliot primly points out, a "superior amusement." Some deceptions are harder to accept than others. This stricture, for instance , that criticism must clarify. But clarify what? Meaning. Message. Moral. What if one is full of doubts? What if one sees no light in a play by Beckett? What if one has nothing to say? Criticism, alas, cannot express that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express. Criticism always has an obligation to express. To clarify. To mean. This is its task, its false sense of duty, its self-righteous mission. Perhaps, critics would serve the theatre better if they thought more about life and less about theatre. Then, perhaps, they would stop reassuring themselves with false theories and formulae. How many countless explanations of theatre have accumulated through the centuries! Earliest of all, in our obligatory introduction to Aristotle, we learn that drama is an "imitation of life." Then later, when we cleverly distinguish between drama and theatre, we begin to discriminate: theatre is a "reproduction of life," a "transmutation of life," a "shamanic act," a "distancing from life" . . . so many manifestations of theatre and so few of life itself. As if the former were infinitely varied, and the latter static. What we need in our theatre is to stop breeding our already incestuous vocabulary of terms, concepts, icons, images, and symbols that refer only to themselves. We need to get out of theatre for a while and take a holiday. A change of air could sharpen our faculties. A breath of life would do us good. Enter the Tourist I am searching for theatre in life-on streets, in people's faces, in cafes, piazzas, waiting rooms, and stations. In my observations, I find patterns of gesture and movement, codes of behavior, and recurring conventions of society that combine to form a scenario of which I am the sole observer. The scenario constantly shifts as I move from Florence to Barcelona, Lugano to Munich, Schaffhausen to Avignon. Restlessly, I watch, absorb, 10 act, and react, at once a spectator and performer in actions of my own making. I turn to travel to renew my faith in theatre because it...