The Stage / Newsblog: How would you feel if you discovered that an independent theatre critic was also an investor in a show that they had awarded five stars?
How would you feel as an audience member who had bought tickets for the show on the basis of what you believed was a reviewer’s impartial and honestly held opinion? How would you feel as a performer or director of a different production who had been reviewed by said critic but didn’t have the good fortune to also have him as an investor?
Or let’s try this: what would you think if you discovered that The Stage had been acting as a producer or co-producer of some of the shows that it is reviewing — apparently independently — within these very pages?
I suspect you, as a theatregoer or theatre professional would be angry. And rightly so. It is a clear conflict of interests.
4 comments:
This article was a little alarming at first. When we read criticism in the papers or hear about it for ourselves, we should take as impartial advice. Criticism is there to make us better at what we do. Now, I can’t really be surprised if someone doesn’t take their job seriously and uses their position to promote their show. I’m sure they do some version of this in many ways for past productions. I can almost be sure that some critics would say negative things about other shows in order to make certain shows shine a little brighter. I know that I’m being pessimistic but this is a business and it works like any other business. Wall Street is not squeaky clean, why should we expect any more or less from the theater industry?
This is a more complex issue than even the article writer believed it was at the time - a member of the Time Out theatre section clarified in the article comments that the show was not reviewed by them, rather by the cabaret and gay sections of the magazine, but the bigger issue is with the organization as a whole having a conflict of interest with itself as it expands. The writer used the disclaimer on NewsCorp articles when they talk about Rupert Murdoch as an example, and that's a really great one - even though those two Critic's Choice sections were in different parts of the magazine, the were still under the Time Out header, which acknowledges that the performances were viewed and judged enough to be deemed worthy of listing (hence, reviewing).
In the industry, it's very difficult to get solid feedback about the effectiveness of your artistic ideas except through reviews - ticket sales won't really speak to it directly, and going directly to the patrons tends to yield less-than-useful and more uninformed opinion. The benefit of reviewers is that they get the chance to put your production and choices in the context of the wider theatrical landscape and make judgements with that framework in place. I agree with the article in saying that Time Out is compromising its independent voice (and thus, trustworthiness) by being tied to the production. As much as I think the Penny Arcade production would appreciate and benefit from feedback, it may take a reviewer stepping out from the official place of critic (maybe on a personal blog) to gain back that perceived independence which will give the comments more weight.
Of course, the Time Out reviewer panning the show if it's bad could work, but might result in a job search.
I agree with the author of the article that any critic with a conflict of interests should not criticize the work with which they have the conflict of interest. Not only does it cast doubt on the authenticity of the criticism itself, which renders it useless from both a consumer and performer viewpoint, but it casts doubt on the rest of the reviews by that critic, as there is a chance that the criticism were more negative for the sake of the production involved in the conflict of interests.
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