Criticism as eulogy

We remember plays for all the wrong reasons. Maybe not as critics—as critics, we are paid to focus on the right reasons, and in any case don’t usually have the column inches to focus on the wrong ones—but certainly as audience members.

There are very few shows I can recall these days where the extra-theatrical has not to some extent crowded out the theatrical in my mind. Even the theatre I can remember well qua theatre—The Tell-Tale Heart, A Large Attendance in the Antechamber, Platonov: Uncut, The War of the Roses—has been infected to some degree by the memories that surround it: the conditions under which each show was seen, the dinners that preceded or follow them, the arguments that were had, the heartbreaks.

Drinking has played its role in this forgetting. I practically slept through Ladybird in 2009, those three martinis gradually taking their toll, before telling Yael Stone that she had been excellent and Sophie Ross, who is a wonderful actress, that she needed to lift her game. I had a great time with the Belarus Free Theatre troupe that same year, before we all suddenly realised, at about three in the morning, that I didn’t understand them and they didn’t understand me. When I woke up the next morning, Being Harold Pinter was a regrettably hazy memory indeed. But mostly one finds that time is the culprit.
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Theatre tends only to beat out time when the theatre in question is particularly wonderful. Life has a tendency to stick in one’s craw far longer, especially when it tends towards the horrid. Even a piece of wonderful theatre can be decimated by the memory by a horrid moment of extra-theatrical reality. I can’t remember a single moment of Tamás Ascher’s Hungarian-language production of Ivanov, for example, bookended as it was by a stage-whispered argument in the stalls and a text message several hours later that severed another relationship forever.

Theatre has played such a central and, at times, disruptive role in my personal life that I no longer look forward with any relish to opening night invitations. I’d sooner attend at the end of the season than at the beginning of it. The more pensioners there are in the audience, the fewer ghosts one is likely to encounter.

Read the full review in The Lifted Brow.