What we mean when we say critical writer

Late in November 2015 I took part in a panel discussion at Central School of Speech and Drama, organised by Matt Trueman (What’s On Stage), alongside Brian Logan (the Guardian, but also artistic director of Camden People’s Theatre) and Andrzej Lukowski (Time Out). We were talking about criticism, how we write it, what we believe it might be for, what the challenges are to the practice, and I’ve never felt more like an alien in my life. It was as though I were speaking a different language; certainly I spoke at half the speed of anyone else, choosing my words meticulously, because what I was describing was mostly what gets called “embedded” criticism (a phrase I basically loathe), and hardly anyone knows what that is, and most of the people who do aren’t sure they approve of it. I was talking about a kind of criticism that thinks about theatre not as a product – the show as seen on press night – but a process: work that is ongoing, seen in rehearsal, seen in front of different audiences, in different spaces, work that is lived and not just performed. A kind of criticism that attempts not simply to comment on theatre, evaluate it, judge it, but dance with it: a criticism mutable enough to change its form, to create its own forms to sit alongside the performance as a kind of written performance, or written sculpture, or written architecture, or written film. A kind of criticism that marries scrupulous integrity with poetic imagination. The kind of criticism that happens more in partnership with theatre-makers (hence “embedded”), less in journalistic contexts such as What’s On Stage, the Guardian or Time Out.

It’s central to the narrative of my life that there is a lost period, roughly the ages 29-33, when I saw hardly any theatre (not even Chris’ version of Three Sisters with live rabbits), because I was burned out and disillusioned and no longer believed in what I was seeing or writing. At the time I was with the Guardian, and at the end of 2008 (when I was 33), the arts desk commissioned me to spend a month behind the scenes with a production at the National, talking to the people I wouldn’t normally talk to – designers, production manager, stage managers – uncelebrated but integral to making theatre happen. I had never spent so much time with a piece of theatre before; never watched it change from rehearsal through tech through preview and press night; never been made so forcibly aware of my own ignorance about how theatre is made. It changed everything for me: changed the relationship I wanted to have with theatre, changed how I wanted to write about it. I’ve never wanted to make theatre, but I’ve always wanted to make: and what I am now dedicated to making is this different kind of criticism, one that is expansive, non-hierarchical, slippery, and surprising as theatre itself.

There is much vested interest, however, in status quo, and the resistance to “embedded” criticism is strong. One common complaint is that it’s indistinguishable from PR: in seeking to tell stories of the making of the production, the multiplicity of its reception, the experience of living through and beside it, the critic becomes a mouthpiece for the theatre-maker, always careful to convey their intention for the work, never assessing it, unravelling it, or exposing its lack. Or, as Dr Joseph Dunne, research associate of Rose Bruford College, phrases it: “Perhaps a greater danger of embedded criticism is that the critic is transformed into a public relations functionary, an official spokesperson for a company that obscures the artwork by foregrounding the humanity of the one who makes it.” Dunne was at the panel discussion at Central and his writing about it also contains this comment:

“I’ve started to think that any dangers the Internet presents to live art practices are as nothing compared to a lack of faith in theatre’s ability to speak to the concerns of the present as distinct from online forums. … It strikes me that embedded criticism is a response to a lack of confidence from critics in theatre’s ability to tell the stories potential audiences want to hear.”

Which, no matter how many times I read it, just makes me think: WTF?

It’s almost five years now since Chris emailed me to tell me about the new company he was starting, and to ask whether I would be interested in thinking about a role he described as: “something like the company ‘narrator’. A cross between a dramaturg, an archivist, a documentary artist, an outreach officer, a brand manager and Jiminy Cricket. Someone whose job it is to remind us what we do, to explain to others who we are, to have a long memory, to relate that memory to the present instant and to what seems likely to happen tomorrow.” Thanks to Chris, I became an “embedded” critic months before the phrase was coined, and I’m still trying to figure out what it means. Because the thing about a role that is a cross between several things is that any of those things might be present in a different proportion each time. Just as every CG&Co work, and related process, is slightly different from the last and the next, so are my relationship with it and the thing I write about it. There is no consistency. And that makes it hard to get a handle on what this is and what I do.

This is my second major attempt at thinking my role in CG&Co through; the first was written over the course of 10 months (June 2014 to April 2015) for an anthology about criticism, edited by Duska Radosavljevic, which won’t be published until autumn 2016. It took a long time because I didn’t know who I was writing it for. This time I know: I’m writing for me, I’m writing for Chris, and I’m writing for the company. And the company, essentially, means you.

I wanted to write it because, over the course of 2015, I noticed that I’d become terrible at explaining my role within G&CO. Not just at events like that panel discussion, or in conversation with people about my work; most problematically, on that first day in the rehearsal room, at the beginning of a process, when some people in the room would know who I am and I why I was there, but not everyone. I noticed myself getting tied up in knots as I tried to explain that I wasn’t there to judge, but to tell stories from the room, but that those stories would aim to be truthful, but I would try to be judicious in what I revealed and what I left out. I noticed myself stumble as I tried to convey that I’m there to see, to witness, the first eyes of an audience soon to come. I’d had enough time, I thought, to crack this one, to have a line or two pat; also, 2015 was the year I started being paid by the company, and that felt official enough to need accuracy and concision. But instead of refining, the words just contorted, or squiggled somewhere beyond reach.

So that’s one thing. But I wanted to write it also because lately I’ve lost faith. Not just because I got a bad review – ha! – from Dr Dunne; or because someone I know told someone else I know that the criticism I do is inethical, more parasitic even than regular mainstream criticism, because it seeks praise as art in its own right while using the more taxing work of theatre-makers as its lifeblood; or because the structures of theatre criticism remain intractable and the more time passes, the more aware I am of being unusual in writing (as “critic”) from the heart of theatre in this way; or because I’m struggling with the guilt of asking people to pay me for writing about their work when they can barely afford to make it; or because I’ve started wondering whether the permanence of this writing makes it antithetical to the work, in defiance of a specific and integral quality – ephemerality – that draws theatre-makers to the form. It’s all those things, but it’s also an internal wrangle: about what it means to write always in the shadow of another, and to what extent that puts you in their service, and whether I do all this work in/with/from/about theatre in part to prevent myself having time to attempt the much harder, creative writing that I’ve always secretly wanted to do (yes, I’m that cliche) but never been brave enough to try. (Last night I listened to the Futureheads cover of The Hounds of Love and, knowing I was writing this today, the chorus was pulverising: “I’ve always been a coward, and I don’t know what’s good for me.” Exactly.)

That internal wrangle is constant enough that last time I whined that I wanted to quit writing about theatre a friend snapped: OK then, do it. But it was sharpened last autumn by my relationship with Weaklings, which is why I’m writing about this here and not in one of the umpteen other spaces I’ve made for myself online. For the five weeks when Weaklings was in rehearsal, I existed within rollercoaster emotions: frustration, excitement, diffidence, fear, bewilderment, disappointment, admiration. I wrote a thing about how freaked out I was by the source material for the show, I spoke to a few people involved in the production, I made a playlist with Chris and one of the performers, put together an edit of the rehearsal diary, and it was like being an editor at the Guardian again, shaping a magazine around the show. And then I watched the show itself at its second performance, in the company of an audience, and something broke. I realised I had no idea what I thought of it. I knew what every element was doing, because I knew what it was intended to do. But I didn’t know what it was doing to me.

Reading a tweet responding to the show by Xavier de Sousa – “Tonight I saw something that spoke a language that I identify with” – I wondered whether the problem is that I don’t speak queer. Reading Megan Vaughan‘s brilliant, if drooling, blog post about it – “If theatre is a form of communication (it is), and we are watching in 2015 (we are) and we’re of a certain age and background and economic privilege (I am), then every show is filtered and translated and interpreted through eyes and a mind that speaks internet, thinks internet, breathes internet” – I wondered whether the problem is that, despite everything, I don’t speak internet, not truly. Both were a lot easier than wondering whether the problem is “embedded” criticism as a premise. Whether everything I’ve been doing for the past four and a half years has been a self-deluding lie.

It pains me that I haven’t written anything about Weaklings since seeing it. It feels like a cop-out, an admission that everyone suspicious of “embedded” criticism is right. It feels as though everything I wrote about it beforehand wasn’t a sticky, slippery cross between dramaturgy, documentary and outreach, but the marketing work of a public relations functionary. Never mind that the stuff I curated while it was still in rehearsal created a kind of parallel performance to the show: a performance that Andrew Haydon, who clearly didn’t get on with Weaklings, says: “contain[s] far more “difficult” content than anything that made it into the show. But perhaps set potential audiences who had read [it] up for something quite different.” A performance that, potentially, reached far more people than the show itself could have in the four performances it’s had so far. I haven’t been able to critique Weaklings, too blinded by watching rehearsals, and therefore I’m not practising the “objective” criticism that we understand by the word. And therefore, basically, I’ve failed.

I play a long game with CG&Co: in the essay for Duska, I wrote that, “I keep in mind the body of work while Chris and his producer focus on the limbs; while their impetus is to push the company forward, mine is to pull back, holding open a space for reflection amid the hurly-burly of touring, staging new work, and R&D.” That still feels like a useful, and accurate, description. Weaklings won’t disappear for me: more writing about it might emerge in three months, or three years, and that’s OK. Doubt is OK, too, as long as it’s not paralysing. But there’s another complicating factor in my relationship to it, which is a mild disagreement between me and Chris. Weaklings was a difficult show to make; some of the reasons for that were conveyed in the material I published, but there’s a bigger story to be told, not to apportion blame, but to communicate the reality of what it is to make theatre under time and financial pressures, in a way that “embedded” criticism is particularly well-positioned to do. I’m keen to crack on with this before distance and nostalgia colour the process rosy; Chris thinks I should wait until Weaklings is no longer a live concern. The reality of my own time (and, to a lesser extent, financial) pressures are such that I wouldn’t get this done for several weeks anyway, but the misalignment between us troubles me. If transparency is partly what drives us, why wait? But even asking the question, I hear my own ego clamouring: a craven desire to prove something, to demonstrate something, to argue the ability of “embedded” criticism to tell the most secret and difficult stories in this industry, and do so with utmost solicitude.

Unsurprisingly, seeing as I’m the only person in CG&Co aside from Chris himself and producer Ric, my role is something we talk about regularly. It took us nearly four years to come up with a title for it – critic in residence – and less than a year later Chris started using instead critical writer; it feels right, for a practice concerned with theatre as a process, that even the naming of it should be ongoing. We had a particularly useful chat in November 2015, focusing on Weaklings, but I didn’t record it – kicking myself now, obvs – so can’t share any of that with you. But I can share this conversation we had in July 2015, which Chris requested specifically because someone we both deeply respect had told him that there’s a general impression that what I do within CG&Co is, you guessed it, functionally PR. There will be more conversations, more thinking, more doubt, more conviction. Just as long as he’ll have me around. (And I say that partly because, transcribing this conversation, one of the things I wish we’d talked about was the difference between me being present in CG&Co rooms, and me being absent from Ponyboy Curtis rooms. But that’s for another day.)

A note on the text (look at me, borrowing from playscripts): … denotes a pause in the thinking, / denotes an interruption, [] denotes text removed in editing (unless, as usual, it contains text inserted today).

M: I’ve noticed in the past couple of months that I’m really rubbish at explaining what I’m doing, in that first conversation in the rehearsal room. And I’m not sure what that’s about. I feel I used to be better at it, but I wonder whether I used to be better because it was OK to not know, and I feel like I ought to know, and I sort of do know, but the articulation in that moment disappears from my mouth.

C: I think the not knowing meant that we were able to do a gloss that was not complex, and now we’ve started actually doing stuff the more official and legitimate – whatever word we’re using instead of the word embedded – the more secure that becomes, the more … I suppose it’s transitional really, it’s just in a transitional phase, ideally that never ends, so it’s about finding a language for describing the transitionality perhaps. Again it feels like there’s a perfunctory two-sentence version of what you do that’s still really easy, and then there’s a ‘we can talk about this for an hour’ and it’s not easy but that covers the ground. I’m really interested in how we acknowledge the complexity without having to re-embody it every time. It’s partly a clarity thing, in terms of more than saying what you do, it’s saying what you don’t do, what you’re not there to do, and it not being a PR role: that feels like a really important clarity to go looking for. [] But also I think being transparent about the not knowingness, about we’re making this up as we’re going along, because there aren’t models for it. Because that then can say something really positive about the company as a whole. What you’re doing feels like a really good way of saying what the company’s about, to say that you’re here doing a thing with us all the time. So this [conversation] is not just me laying my cloak over a puddle for you, of going let’s make sure everyone knows you’re not a PR person or whatever that narrative is: it’s also about going, look at this exciting thing we’re doing that’s too ungraspable at the moment to describe succinctly. There’s something in a sense about having to stage that as a conversation, or having somehow to give a picture of that relationship or the dialogue around it, because a standard-issue paragraph saying what it is isn’t going to be able to say what it is: it feels like it [] needs movement or it needs vectors so it doesn’t look like a capsule of anything. So I think that’s where I’m coming from. Does that reflect your day-to-day experience? Because that’s the thing I want to be careful to do, is not tell your story through my wish for it.

M: I think this is one of the complications around my inability to say what I do: my day-to-day experience has really changed over the past couple of years, from the first two years, and even more in the past year to the year before that. That’s partly around leaving the Guardian and doing much less – I mean zero – of that kind of prescribed journalistic writing about theatre, which means that the shift in my sense of who I was anyway, who I was in relation to the company, and who I was in relation to theatre [] has made me go: ah, so who am I? And I think the transition that has happened over the past year [] is thinking where I’m positioning in this as an “artist” but not really knowing how to own that or claim that [] or how to articulate that, because I’m still carrying the baggage of the critic and the journalism and the newspaper. And I wonder whether we would even need this conversation if I had been positioned as an artist four years ago [], something might have been simpler all along, I don’t know. []

So the day-to-day experience shifts have been around that, but they’ve also been coming out of what you do as a journalist, which is soak up information, order it and report on it, to where I am now, which is much more about storytelling and gathering voices. [] I feel like this conversation is still having to speak to that set of assumptions from three or four years ago and we’ve kind of moved past them now and are thinking, will you just let us go.

C: There’s a question that that then opens up for me about your relationship with the company, actually in relation to this question of … So there’s an anxiety around some of the reception of what you’ve been doing that is about going, ‘are you a mouthpiece for the company?’, and I think we’ve spent some of the last period wanting to assert your independence in that sense, there not being a party line and not being any pressure on you to misreport or to spin.** And then if – and I really like this – but if we’re now talking about you being part of the artistic team in a way that we wouldn’t necessarily have used that language, then actually we come back into that territory of, not spin exactly, but a kind of alignment with the goals of the company and the goals of the work, that in a funny sense compromises your journalistic integrity, because you’re part of delivering something where there is an imperative around it to express … I don’t know whether it’s about expressing things positively, but it’s about there being a positivity to everything you do that doesn’t preclude your being able to exist in a really critical relationship with, or even a sceptical relationship with it, but it does mean that you’re part of a delivery team that maybe doesn’t have the same protocols in it, around distance and hygiene and a kind of reaching after a, not an objectivity, but a disinterested subjectivity. I’m really interested in that as a shift.

M: That’s massively interesting. Number one, I’m not sure how long that can last anyway, that can be a good beginning position but I don’t know that that’s a relationship that can last beyond the first couple of years anyway, the disinterested thing /

C: Why?

M: In the same way that I don’t think it lasts for a political journalist, or a sports journalist, and it is to do with fandom. I think as a political journalist, there will be politicians you admire and politicians you think are utter shits, and to whatever degree you attempt to maintain and to articulate an objectivity, you have politics, you’re writing about politics because you’re interested in that. That’s one of the moments where I just go, why would we expect anything different from people who write about theatre, or why would we be more troubled by theatre being honest about that stuff, in a way that political journalists probably just are not honest about it? I don’t know: I think a lot about journalism and I think a lot about, you go into journalism because you want to tell stories about the world, but you do it with more passion and investment when it’s stories about something in the world that you feel a connection with, and I think all of the objectivity is smoke and mirrors, always.

The thing that’s been quite clear to me from really early on is that I don’t think we’d have even had the conversation [about me joining the company] if I had been genuinely objective and disinterested, by which I mean I’d never seen any of your work before and I didn’t really know who you were or what you were trying to do, and also I wasn’t saying stuff that resonated with all those things in you as well. So it’s impossible to be disinterested if what you’re inviting is me to bring my passion for this thing into your orbit, and so maybe that sort of objectivity and disinterest is kind of a pose that is to do with the framework being ‘I’m usually a journalist, I should attempt to apply that model’.

But then I think about my position in Fuel [the link is to the blog I’ve been curating for them, documenting their touring research project New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood], where I occupy a sort of ‘critical friend’ space: [] I’ve been really aware of the blog as this kind of cheerleading space, which can be read as PR or whatever, not objective, blah blah blah, but for me what that’s about is actually I’ve had lots of really positive experiences through working with them, because of the encounters that they’ve made possible, and I’m always really honest about any negative aspect of those, to the extent of really hacking off some of the venues that they were working with, so even though it’s got this refulgence of positivity, actually there’s been a fair bit of negative comment and a fair bit of taking people to task, which because it doesn’t fit the PR narrative, people can gloss over very easily. []

So I guess what it’s about now is, if this is part of the artistic practice, how do we hold on to those qualities that we thought journalism was giving us but we only relate that to journalism because journalism is very successful about lying about those things, and use those things in a more honest and acute way? []

C: There’s a thing about, in this conversation you’ve been radiating the word “artist” in relation to what you do with exactly the face that you’re now pulling [rough approximation: face scrunched as though I’d taken a bite from a maggoty apple], but it feels like a big thing to be at that place where we have to encounter that as an idea. I feel very relaxed about it in some ways at least, but I’m really interested in, I probably wouldn’t call myself an artist very readily, but I would call myself a maker – but if I’m a maker then absolutely you’re a maker as well, and one of the things that I’m thinking about in relation to our respective making tasks is that something that you do, by doing all of the other things that you do, of being the maker in whom the ethical questions in the room are being most, not just most articulated, but most embodied. Because that’s what you do, you’re somehow facilitating a reading of the relationships in the room through an ethical lens, and that’s partly because of the tasks that you have in making from that room an account or an extension or a cipher or however we think about that, but quite often it’s a moment to moment thing that’s not dependent on or only secured by the idea of something being written at the end.

Also, [] it feels like one of the ways that you [are] distinctive in [a rehearsal] room is that [you’re not] there all the time: just having that different rhythm of someone coming and going, even in itself, although it’s not in a sense a thing you’re making, it’s part of something that is made in the room through your engagement with the process. For me that in itself creates a sense of breathing, a sense of inside and outside that otherwise wouldn’t be present, a reminder of different kinds of authority and different kinds of belonging and different kinds of perspective on what’s happening. [] I suppose I feel more and more like the weird thing about saying you’re a maker, or saying one is a maker, is that things are made that are not your principal aim or target: they’re things that are made because of how you show up or who you are in the morning.

M: I guess the question I want to ask out of that is: what is different for you, or what makes you think differently, if I’m framed as maker or if I’m framed as journalist or critic?

C: This will feel very rudimentary but there’s an outsideness to that, to the journalistic position, that pertains even when you’re as embedded as anybody. And I think if I think of you as a maker, which I increasingly do and I feel excited by that, it’s not that it stops that outsideness being present, but it becomes part of your range of competences as a maker, that sometimes you will have recourse to a place outside in order to look or in order to listen, and that feels to me like when that’s part of a making process it creates an expansion of what making is in the room. So in a sense, once it’s become performance technology rather than documentary technology, it is a way for the process itself to become enlarged and complicated, productively complicated, whereas the complications around your journalistic process, when it’s more cordoned off, I suppose become a different kind of noise, a kind of noise that we’re trying to eliminate rather than a noise that is fertile.

M: So essentially this is all really positive. [Yes, I was surprised!] In the past year and before that as well I’ve been thinking of writing in terms of what the performance of writing is, and one of the things that I’ve been thinking about in terms of ’embedded’ criticism, and why there’s still not really anyone else doing it, is I don’t think you can do it genuinely or with a true heart if you want to be a maker. I don’t think you can, and I think that’s why Matt [Trueman] had to pull out of it really quickly. [] He’s the person who wants to step in and tell everyone: these are the questions you’re not addressing and these are the things you’re not pushing at. [] It’s the same conversation that we had [in 2011], that if you thought that I wanted to step in and say, no, everyone, let’s do it this way, I wouldn’t be in the room. That remains a really key thing for me, that even if it’s a practice that has the same name, making, it’s still coming from this different tradition and this different approach and this different thought process and the desired outcome is also different: that feels fundamental.

C: In some ways it’s close to Ric’s position: Ric is again someone who is co-making the work – but he doesn’t want to be script-writing, [] the hand that he has in it is exactly what he wants, and sometimes that’s about distance and moral support, these sorts of things. A thing that’s interesting to me right now is whether what that reflects is a capaciousness in the word making that is either useful or not useful for us in how we look at what processes are and what methodologies are. It certainly feels to me like, for example, Ric could be a different sort of producer and not be someone who I feel like making with and we could still make the same work: there’s a good bunch of questions there about what’s different. In a sense it’s an angle of incidence thing: you are making but the vector of your making is crossing ours, which is good because it means some of that energy is pushing in the same direction as us, some of it is pulling away. More and more I think what I do as a maker is manage tensions or manage those dynamics where things are pulling in different directions, that feels like where the birthiness of what we do is done, so in a sense I feel like it’s very easy for me to say I couldn’t make what I make if you weren’t in the room at an angle to it.

M: Sort of like soundwaves, yours is like that [hmmm, communication breakdown here, sorry], mine is like that, there are multiple points of intersection.

C: And beating. That’s a really nice analogy.

M: That’s not going to help me when I sit down in the next rehearsal room.

C: No! [] But I do think at the very least this conversation makes me want to revisit the two-sentence version of what it is that you say, which isn’t something I think I thought I knew I wanted, but there’s something so specific about what I think we mean when we say critic in relation to what you do, and I wonder whether it can’t be heard. I know there’s that absolutely brilliant thing [Hannah Silva said] about we make the word stretch, we just use that word until it means what we think it means, but when it’s not a nuanced conversation then finding a way of talking about you as a maker, that acknowledges the distinction of what you make. In a way what it does do, really joyously, is point up the complete inadequacy of embeddedness, because what that implies – as a kind of extraneous element that’s being forced to take up a position inside – is actually the complete opposite of what it is: I think you’re an element on the inside that’s continually reaching towards an outside. I’ve no idea what that language is but it’s good to acknowledge that even the bit that we thought might be all right isn’t really all right.

** I just want to come back to this point Chris makes, regarding “independence … there not being a party line and not being any pressure on you to misreport or to spin”, because the PR thing suggests there are various assumptions to the contrary. Almost everything I’ve written about the company responded to an impulse of my own rather than a prompting from Chris; almost everything wasn’t read by him until after publication; on the rare occasions where I’ve sought his or Ric’s opinion on writing in advance, it’s been because I want to be sure of telling a story with precision and without slant. I am much slower in documenting than Chris would like me to be, and probably more selfish, or self-regarding, too. But, until this website was created in Spring 2015, everything I wrote was for my own blog – an imperfect arrangement, to my mind, because the writing felt disconnected and, for want of a better word, unofficial. But having a company blog space has brought its own questions: I don’t yet know whether it’s OK here to be the person I am on my blog, scattershot, verbose, melancholy, and (on recipe days) ridiculous. I don’t yet know the extent to which the shift in context makes my writing look like it’s pulling its punches. These are yet more things I’m still finding out.