The Last Temptation of Criticulous

I trudge through the darkness that is merely a shadow. Above me, the canopy that hides me from the light is a thin lattice of reports on audience responses to live events. Yet the canopy is not natural: those reports that seem the thinnest, based on the least rigorous scholarship and little or vague data, cast the deeper shadows.  And in the darkness, looming, a figure that I can barely make out and yet retains a fearsome aspect.

My conversations with Lucifer are a matter of concern both to the preacher and the psychotherapist, and still, I recognise him from the mellifluous tone of his voice. He urges me to accept that theatre, all art, is merely cultural capital. It’s a product, the same as washing powder and purchased with the same criteria: value for money, efficiency of effect, reputation of the brand. The quality I supposedly seek is merely a reflection of my own vanity, an untoward emphasis on efficiency that is, at once, an attempt to make spiritual the material (a play may be ephemeral, but it is, above all, physical and temporal) and an act of my disturbed social conscience.

‘In seeking to make theatre some kind of exalted species of experience, you only occupy its existence, make it another tool in your relentless quest to aggrandise yourself,’ he sneers. ‘Critic, you want the arts to be holy, in order to bask in its glory, like a provincial priest pretending to holiness through his post rather than his actions.’

I don’t know why Lucifer still bothers with me: he already has the arts administration in his lair. What appears to be a sensitive attempt to involve the audience in the analysis of art – to define quality as being defined by the audience and not a panel of elevated experts – is quickly revealed as a cynical exercise in marketing. The language of consumerism stinks out the discussions of audience reception of performance.

‘You are a pocket of resistance – an elitist. Remember how Tony Blair would attack ‘conservative forces’ that believed they knew better than the common man or woman. That’s you, Vile. Former Latin teacher, cod-intellectual.’

The attack is always swift, always emerges from the darkness and retreats back into the warmth of the night. I make tentative statements about why I follow theatre – they usually involve a recollection of Iona Kewney’s solo, and the majesty of the intense, emotional experience.

Lucifer sneers and points out that in requesting art to be so divine, so authentic, I am begging it to have qualities that my life lacks. I am buying into a myth of artistic behaviour to support my intellectual superiority.

“And so reduce it to cultural capital. You already fit in one of the demographics.’

Attempts to qualify art through audience response are sophisticated. Here, a paper reduces it to a simple formula – KRAC. The audience wants Knowledge, to escape Risk, to experience Authenticity and Collective engagement. The quality of the play depends on its ability to offer all four.

There is no indefinable quintessence that makes for good.

There is no value to art that offers genuine transformation – if such art even exists.

There is only product, assessed by weight like the packet of old fashion sweets I buy on cheerless mornings to help me past the bus journey into the office.

My job as a critic is merely to help set up the shop window. My job is to give Knowledge, to reduce Risk.