The acerbic critic Anton Ego from the animated movie Ratatouille (© Pixar/Disney)
With the Edinburgh Fringe just around the corner, there are plenty of performers out there bracing for the most intense experience of the year. And along with the pressures of having to create, perfect and publicise your show, there’s another looming challenge: what if you get a bad review?
It’s something I’ve thought about as a person who writes reviews, and it’s an issue the ace performer Tomás Ford picked up on in a piece for the Huffington Post yesterday, called Suck It Up: How to Deal With Your Bad Review. As he notes, Ford has had experience of both good and bad reviews and he offers a range of useful options for acts feeling clobbered by negative responses to their work, including taking control of your story and getting good and wasted.
But there was one part of Ford’s article that stuck in my craw: the bit where he advised performers to “find a way of summing up why the reviewer is wrong”. This appeared under the heading “Review the reviewer” – but if a reviewer went into a performance intending to “find a way of summing up why the show is bad”, we’d rightly think of them as both mean-spirited and lacking in credibility.
The idea of reviewing the reviewer is, however, a vital one: if the critic isn’t making a sincere effort to engage thoughtfully with the work, they should be called on it; but if they are, why shouldn’t the performer make a sincere effort to engage thoughtfully with that response, even if it’s a negative one?
The answer is often simple and understandable: defensiveness rooted in insecurity. No one likes to be told, however constructively, that someone doesn’t like what they do – as I know myself from seeing negative responses to my own writing, producing and filmmaking efforts. But anyone who takes their work seriously owes it to themselves to consider whether there are ways of doing it better, and to admit the possibility that a shrewd, articulate observer might have identified one or two of them.
So, to my mind, the best response to a bad review isn’t to instinctively pooh-pooh it, but to ask yourself these five simple words:
“Do they have a point?”
Of course, the answer might be a resounding no. They might fail to understand what you’re attempting, or judge your work against standards you consider redundant, or offer vituperative put-downs divorced from evidence or argument. In which case, sod ’em. You know they’re wrong, so don’t give them headspace.
Then again, they might get what you’re trying to do perfectly well and still have coherently reasoned criticisms – ideas about how the piece’s execution works against the sensibility it espouses, or challenges to fundamental assumptions about form or subject matter you might not even have been conscious of making. In which case, take the critique on board and put it to use, if not in that show then in your next.
Haters gonna hate, and a badly-written drubbing can still dent a show’s box-office (just as a badly-written rave can boost it). That doesn’t change the fact that we all make mistakes, whatever we do. And sometimes other people pick up on them. It’s not a nice feeling when it happens, but it’s up to us whether we reject all such criticism out of hand or turn it to our advantage. The worst option of all is to deny its legitimacy but still let it eat away at you.
In other words, if a critic takes a dump on your show, don’t sit around complaining about the smell. Sweep that shit out – or, even better, use it to fertilise your garden.
My Guardian ebook on Critical Writing is now available here. Get the Guardian edition for half-price during July 2014 with code author50.
