The Routledge Companion to Adaptation edited by Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts

Abstract

study be ignoring as a result? Part Two (Critics’ Voices) looks at the critics themselves. Mark Fisher’s ‘Do They Mean Me? A Survey of Fictional Theatre Critics’ is a delightful taxonomy of some of the hoary tropes that plague critics as characters within plays. Such characters act as agonistic sites for the working-out of the complex emotions invoked by the triangulation of artist, critic, and audience: the critic as the butt of the joke, the critic as Lothario, the critic as drunk, and the critic as corpse. Along with Mark Brown’s chapter, ‘Between Journalism and Art: The Location of the Criticism in the Twenty-First Century’, and ‘Code-Switching and Constellations: On Feminist Theatre Criticism’ by Jill Dolan (creator of the George Jean Nathan Award-winning blog The Feminist Spectator), Fisher’s article is an important reminder that, in addition to absorbing the implications of the digital turn, critics must also navigate an uneasy social kinship with their publics, one still burdened by perceptions of class-based gatekeeping typified by old print sources. If the first two parts roughly map onto past and present, the third part of the book, entitled ‘Changing Forms and Functions of Criticism’, considers the future. In the first-person perspective of ‘Criticism as a Political Event’, Diana Damian Martin sees utopian possibility in the act of criticism, which she figures as ‘a political event [that] always makes visible the space between the referent and the critic itself’ (234). For Martin, ‘[t]he site of this eruption is public; it makes manifest a conditioning of the perception and articulation of a referent for which there is a fight for shared experience and collectivity’ (234). For Matthew Reason (‘Conversation and Criticism: Audiences and Unfinished Critical Thinking’) and Michelle MacArthur (‘Crowdsourcing the Review and the Record: A Collaborative Approach to Theatre Criticism and Archiving in the Digital Age’), the digital, for all its drawbacks, is what makes this utopian collectivity possible. The non-traditional critical samples in the fourth part are noteworthy less for their collective impulse than for the creativity with which they incorporate the digital and analogue, such as in Alice Saville’s hand-illustrated review of the children’s theatre show Huff (2014), and Vaughan’s typically uproarious phone-text-and-emoji-filled review of the Royal Court’s equally wild (and criminally misunderstood) show Teh Internet is Serious Business (2014). Even if these examples celebrate individual creativity over communal creation, they still bespeak a very bright future for theatre criticism indeed, whatever form that mysterious landscape might take.