Hi Jana – an itierestnng provocation. I think the situation now is vastly better to what it was even five years ago, when there was hardly any discussion at all outside mainstream newspapers (the single exception was RealTime) and theatre companies were active in repressing negative reviews, to the point of campaigning for critics to be sacked if they were too negative. The difference is blogs. One itierestnng aspect of the Australian theatre blog scene is that it is pretty much a critical blog culture – there are a lot of reviewing blogs and websites. And among them there are quite a few experienced former or practising mainstream critics (eg, myself, Boyd, Pickard, Waites). And none of those blogs is in the least backwards in negative criticism. The tendency towards politeness, or the fear of being disliked for one’s frankly expressed opinion, is more a dilemma of newly emerging critics. And the question of a critic’s position in the theatre is an old chestnut. On this one I agree with Michael Billington: it is much more difficult negotiating the reviewing of one’s enemies than it is of one’s friends, who just have to put up with you. A friend will expect honesty, and is more likely to take it in the spirit of good faith; with an enemy – ie, someone who has publicly locked horns with you – criticism is much more likely to be construed as a personal attack, and has to be written so impersonally and with such objective chilliness that it’s an enormous challenge. Maybe the most difficult time I’ve had on that was when I had to review an MTC play by Hannie Rayson in which the leading villain, Alan Croggon, was named after me (there is a long history of my bad reviews of her work, and of my being villified for those reviews). It was only the second review I did for the Australian, and it threw me into a quandary that made me very angry: I am not in the least interested in personal attacks, but I had to write a review of a play in which my name resounded (it seemed) every two seconds from the mouth of a sadist or as a hypocritical coward. It made it very difficult to watch and assess the play, and I felt the only thing I could do was write a “objective” review which ignored the personal aspect. That’s the only time when I’ve backpedalled on criticism: although I made my negative opinion of the play clear, I was forced to be utterly restrained, to the point where I felt censored. And yet I had no choice: if I had been less restrained, it would have been as a counter-attack, rather than a work of critical response. (I expect what I wrote was considered a counter-attack anyway). But that kind of thing is not about discussing art at all. And in fact is much rarer in theatre than it is in other artforms. If you want to see a problematic critical culture, look at Australian poetry reviewing, which is almost exclusively by other poets, and which is almost exclusively “supportive”. I might have been excoriated as a theatre reviewer on occasions, which is par for the course, but that’s nothing like the viciousness and abiding vengefulness of a wronged poet.

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