Ottawa: Competing Priorities in the Nation’s Capital

The 2015 Fringe Festival season in Ottawa was clouded by scandal. Soon after a critic from the bloggers’ collective the Capital Critics’ Circle posted a devastating review of a dance show, it was revealed that he had in fact seen only the dancers’ pre-show warm-up and left his seat after ten minutes.¹ As an interdisciplinary theatre artist, I was especially peeved by this reviewer’s lack of awareness about the conventions of contemporary dance or dance theatre. Arts practitioners across the city cited this review as an example of a perceived lack of both professionalism and cultural education among independent “new media” theatre critics. The review was surprising, since the Capital Critics’ Circle is associated with both the Canadian and International Associations of Theatre Critics and claims to conform to their codes of ethics.

Rachel Eugster, an actor and founding partner of the independent theatre collective Bear & Co., describes an imbalance between Ottawa’s “increasingly accomplished theatre community” and a critical community that has insufficient resources to cover “the astonishing number of shows across a wide array of genres and styles.” Ottawa has just four paid arts critics. Patrick Langston, the only one writing in English, contributes regular freelance theatre reviews to the Ottawa Citizen, while also covering general arts topics and the housing industry. Langston, on his own, covers all the theatre productions at the National Arts Centre and Great Canadian Theatre Company; half of the work at the curated professional festivals like undercurrents; twenty per cent of the professional work independently produced at the Gladstone Theatre; and twenty per cent of shows at the Fringe Festival. Francophone artists seem better served, with two paid critics working for Le Droit and one for Radio-Canada, yet they are not theatre specialists and are often uncomfortable with innovation. Consequently, edgy Franco-Ontarian work, which already draws small audiences in this majority anglophone region, is at a disadvantage.

Langston recalls the early 1980s, when CBC Ottawa had two theatre critics and the Ottawa Citizen employed one reviewer in English and one in French. But while the number of professional critics has decreased since that time, the volume of theatre to critique has increased substantially. Nowadays, most professional theatre companies in Ottawa are independent, and since very few benefit from operating funding, they rely on ticket sales to cover wages, venue rentals, and promotional costs. For Ottawa practitioners, the fact that “professional” critics have largely been replaced by an ever-changing group of self-appointed bloggers has led to a feeling that those loud critical voices impact our revenues and careers even more unfairly than if they were “paid professionals” governed by a code of conduct. In the age of blogging, anyone can call themselves a reviewer—and, indeed, many do; for example, Apt. 613 engages volunteer bloggers so that all Fringe shows are reviewed, and the local blogosphere also includes The New Ottawa Critics, The Visitorium, Theatre Ottawa, and Onstage Ottawa.

With the hope of training a new generation of skilled cultural workers, Professor Yana Meerzon teaches a practical class on theatre criticism at the University of Ottawa. For Meerzon, the critic’s opinion must stem from his or her curiosity and profound knowledge of theatre: “The critic must understand how [the production] works [and] must be able to speak the same language as the artist who made it. He/she must be knowledgeable about aesthetics, philosophy, style, genre, theatre history; so professionalism is about education in the art form.”

Rachel Eugster and Cory Thibert in Bear & Co.’s 2016 production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Photo by Andrew Alexander

Kat Fournier is a former student of Meerzon’s whose MA work in theatre studies at York University focused on criticism. A reviewer with Capital Critics’ Circle and co-host of the arts and culture podcast Just Another Gala, Fournier explains that her job is to attend shows “as a journalist and critical voice, not as a patron and not as a paid PR person. To mistake this relationship for a publicity exchange is so...