“Criticism is not the worst thing about Galician theatre”. The quote is from a theatre critic, pronounced towards the end of the decade of 2000 and, at the same time as having a preventive disposition, it conceals a falsehood dismissed as naive. At that time, as now, it is necessary to understand that if something is not the worst of something, it is because the two elements are part of the same whole. But no. Criticism was never part of the theatrical whole. In the last forty years criticism was many things, but it was never integrated as part of a stage system that was too focused on the immediate. Criticism was a usual suspect, a permanent complaint, a complementary argument for congresses, weeks, festivals, shows and stage debates. It was many things, but it never ended up forming part of a whole that needed it as a loudspeaker, but not as a generator of arguments. <\/p>
In these years we have talked too much about criticism. We entered the paradox in which while criticism tried to talk about theatre, theatre wanted to talk about criticism like someone who wants to settle accounts with the family. We talk too much about criticism because it is well known that once the theatre leaves the stage, the first thing it worries about is mirrors. And by looking in the mirror of criticism, the stage entered the loop of claiming criticism, another criticism, without accepting the one that existed. A criticism with skills that the theatre itself didn’t handle. They asked, without explaining it, for a criticism custom-made for companies, plays, for their circumstances and their limitations, a criticism that accepted a particular metric system: to measure everything with the supposed excuse that in Galicia everything is more difficult, to pass everything through a filter summarized in a phrase heard in another debate in the Diario Cultural many years ago: “for a Galician, it’s quite good”. It was not quoted by someone unsuspecting. It was someone with interlocution, knowledge and I would even say with a certain command. Everybody wanted one or another attitude from the critics. Some wanted more toughness with the big companies so that they wouldn’t lose their way, others wanted more criticism for the new companies so that they wouldn’t go astray. There were those who wanted more to be said about the performers, and there were those who proposed a numerical system that, in the end, would sum up the critique from 1 to 5, with five being the highest. Everyone wanted one thing or another, but hardly anyone wanted what was already there. The other coincidence was that ‘the profession’ wanted reviews that were formally good and, above all, well understood: the text, good; the cast, good; the sets, good; the play, good. If the task of criticism is to leave no one happy, Galician stage critics complied. Almost all of them. <\/p>
Perhaps this happened because the relationship between theatre and criticism never ceased to be biological and Galician theatre, so in need of standardization, tried to strategically formulate a satellite criticism, formulated in the most conventional way possible and which, in a certain sense, was a crutch to save some problems that the ‘sector’ itself was unable to solve easily. It cannot be said that Galician theatre maintains a regular relationship with the public. Not as a whole. It is an insecure relationship, based on mutual ignorance. And, unless Meetic fixes it, with a certain reluctance to get to know each other. <\/p>
In historical recapitulation, Galician theatre prioritized organizing the profession before anything else. To organize means to give it stability, recognition and, as in any other profession, salaries. The public did not come first, the profession came first. There were reasons to act that way. I’m sure they were sure that by having a profession the spectators would show up. The more years go by the more it shows that it didn’t work. Not for the ensemble. In the history of Galician theatre there is a certain discomfort with the public. As if deep down, but not very deep down, this was a matter for another business. A discomfort rooted in the idea that doing theatre is enough. The idea that all the work a play requires cannot also assume a relationship with the public and their random, and sometimes simple, preferences. An attitude that, from time to time, wanted to be summed up in a sectorial phrase: “we do theatre, the rest is not our business”. As if the audience were not really a theatrical matter. It could have been escapism, impossibility, accommodation and the odd case of unbridled artistic hubris. All in all, it was a failure to maneuver with the idea that the audience has nothing to say and that their passivity in the armchair responds to a culturally passive attitude. <\/p>
In a not too metaphorical way, the relationship with the audience was outsourced by Galician theatre. It was sent to other institutions, councils, agencies, institutes, and also, as was appropriate, to the media. They sent it to the civic duty of the citizenship and to the critics, as an apparent authority that should prescribe theatre attendance in the most positive sense of the possible. An authority that the citizens should recognize but, in fact, the stage sector itself did not want to understand as such. <\/p>
In a very unspecific way, it can be understood that the irregular relationship of the Galician stage sector with the spectators was also the sector’s irregular relationship with the critics. With the singularity that it is much easier to get on badly with a few than with a collective that you should be seducing to pay to see you. The parallelism reveals one of the general misunderstandings of what criticism is and where it is framed. For a considerable part of the stage sector, criticism is an appendix that ‘must’ be there. It ‘must understand’ the sector’s own strategies and be oriented towards them. But criticism is not part of theatre. Criticism is part of the audience. If it ‘must’ understand something, it must be the strategies of the audience. If it must understand something, it is the reception, not the production. It is part of the spectator collective and perhaps that is why criticism is made in the media and not on stage. It’s a mistake that is sometimes very interesting and sometimes very annoying. <\/p>
Placed in the middle of the mistake and involved by the strategies of the needs of the sector, the critique had to be the solution to a defect. It had to be part of a solution that in some round tables appeared under the word complicity, which in hypothesis reduced the distance between the public and the companies offers. There was no previous question, there was no note on whether that was the theatre that corresponded to that time, whether handing over the Galician stage to Elizabethan theatre made sense, whether the alliances with Portuguese companies made sense, whether Galician theatre was getting its repertoire right. There were no questions, but there was an opinion: criticism should be part of the solution. But in no case should it be part of the diagnosis. <\/p>
Criticism was understood as a subaltern activity to theatre or to any activity about which it speaks. There is a hierarchical relationship, according to those who assume the qualification of creator for themselves, in which in more than one way criticism must assume the strategic and sometimes also the tactical objectives of that genre to which, in any case, it does not belong. The ‘sector’ considered criticism was an activity that depended on its existence, and it had to understand this subordinate relationship. In a somewhat prosaic sense, the mission of criticism was to accompany the path of theatre for the better. In a somewhat sarcastic sense, criticism had to dedicate itself to the culture of care. <\/p>
It is true that in the 90\u2019s and 00\u2019s theatre criticism in Galicia maintained a very different attitude to the criticism of any genre and to literary criticism in particular. Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o explained in a debate on criticism in the Diario Cultural, which then existed, that it could be “unfair to the theatre that while any book received laudatory or at least kind reviews, in theatre criticism was much more uncomfortable. It seemed that in Galician literature there were no bad books, but there were bad plays”. Bola\u00f1o knew, too, that this was not the fault of theatre criticism. <\/p>
Propping up and not pointing <\/strong> <\/p> In the period in which the autonomous culture lasted, let’s put that between 1984 and 2014 to choose round figures, stage criticism was a voluntary exercise. This meant that it was either carried out by media professionals who used their time or extra time to fulfil their self-imposed obligations in criticism, or by people who came from the environment of the stage world and who, as the best option, could consider the publication of reviews as another means of making a curriculum vitae. Between these two points, there were few exceptions. Not as a system. In these three decades, which could be four if we stretch the dates a little, there were no great changes in criticism in Galicia because it was scarce, although persistent, and did not have many operative facilities. To publish a critique it is necessary to insist to the mass media. The means never claims them. This was, more or less, the system. There were not many incorporations because, as a Galician director and actor used to say, no child wakes up one morning and tells his parents: I want to be a theatre critic. <\/p> All these difficulties and some others closer to the bar have a folkloric point. But they make up a landscape in which the critic moves with a certain discomfort. The discomfort of, finally, criticism not being considered as a genre and, therefore, it not being able to establish its own functioning conditions and grow up the way it decided best and had the option of choosing its own signifiers. This was not fully understood in the sector even though the profession was used to working with interpretations, to working with the semantics of words and with that tense arc of knowing that things are made to be interpreted. The spectators seemed to understand this better than the stage sector. <\/p> In the theatrical world there is a na\u00efve admiration for ‘good reviews’ that are usually the worst written. There are more supporters of simplicity than of clarity. As a newspaper editor used to say: “subject, verb and predicate”. If criticism tries to recognize itself as language, the profession doesn’t like it, because there is a fear that instead of bringing spectators to the show, they will be sent to a library. Or to Twitter. Criticism cannot have the dialectical level of theatre. There is a displeasure when critics use the same literary apparatus to explain themselves that the theatre used to tell the story of the play. And this must raise suspicions about how theatre understands the work of criticism. <\/p> Dependencies<\/strong> <\/p> Spectators tend to understand criticism better than professionals because they are much less dependent on it. Dependency is a thread that alters all perceptions. In many ways, criticism has never depended on how the theatre is doing. It depends much more on how the media is doing, how the readers are doing, how the spectators are doing. It depends on how it goes for a society in which it is framed in a very residual point. And very precarious. <\/p> There are many ways of understanding criticism. But perhaps the debate is how it conceives itself. Non-academic criticism, I mean. It would be necessary to find another name for it so that scholars don’t stand up at round tables and complain. In a very general way, criticism, all of it, including theatre criticism, is a continuation of journalism by other means. From its birth until now its character has not been altered so much. You have to tell something that happens, and you have to tell something about how it happens and the meaning it has. In this apparently simple method, there is another element that literary criticism forgot and that not even art or music criticism have: the idea that every cultural fact must be related to the society in which it is produced and to the moment in which it happens. Theatre criticism seems to keep better the reference that theatre, more than anything else, has the intention of explaining what happens to us and how it happens to us as a collective. Theatre criticism should not lose this reference: if theatre doesn’t explain us, what is theatre for? If criticism doesn’t explain what theatre is for, what is criticism for? <\/p> Criticism is a continuation of journalism by other means. But there is something in its functioning that makes it a cultural tool that is still operative: criticism is to culture what culture is to society. Culture is the memory of society; criticism is the memory of culture. Perhaps I am not here to resolve black and white questions about whether plays are good or bad. Nor to decide whether a performer was more or less energetic in his role. The small professional anxieties do not belong within the work of criticism, just as the discomfort of criticism itself must be assumed as part of the job. It is a space of conflict and it is necessary to understand it this way. It must be understood as it should have been understood that the work of criticism is to achieve its own relationship with its audiences.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Criticism is not the worst thing about Galician theatre”. The quote is from a theatre critic, pronounced towards the end of the decade of 2000 and, at the same time as having a preventive disposition, it conceals a falsehood dismissed as naive. 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