As an artist I am defiantly protective of my right to abstain from responding to newspaper critics. I savour the silence of non-response. However as head of a drama department and teacher I am drawn to consider the way the relationship between the media and the performing arts operates.

I acknowledge and revel in engaging with the role of the media as an integral element of the educational process. Especially in arts education. Criticism is a most exciting and energising force in artistic creation.

For this reason the work of the respected theatre reviewer whose article on The Baltimore Waltz was featured in the Grocott's Mail of 24 August seems to me problematic.

The fourth year directing students in the Rhodes Drama Department present their examinable projects in a season of theatre to which the public is invited, as are theatre critics, in order to have professional critical response to the work included as part of the student directors’ learning experience.

Let’s be clear, I have no problem with the reviewer’s subjective response to the aesthetic choices made by the playwright and the director.

Had he, however, written the review having seen the entire work; the 30 minutes which the director crafted through the four weeks of rehearsal, you would not be reading this.

But, as the reviewer admits, he only saw the work “halfway through” since there was a power failure on campus that evening 10 minutes after curtain up.

After ten minutes of exposure to a 30 minute work, the reviewer felt confident enough to critically respond.

The facts of the foreshortened performance combined with the tone of the review give me the strong sense that the reviewer was engaged in a writing exercise; to write an acerbic, negative review in an  entertaining way.

The attention being on the reviewer's literary skill and wit rather than the theatre work being reviewed.

My only plea would be to the person setting the learning outcomes for this student reviewer to draw his attention to the self evident criteria that seeing a complete theatre work is the means of earning the privilege of page space in which to disseminate his critical opinion on that work.

On reflection though, I take considerable comfort in that fact that this, eventually, was a good learning experience for the student director since she has been exposed at an early stage of the preparation for her career as a practitioner, to the fact that just because the word appears in print there is no guarantee that it has been written by anyone with any integrity.
Andrew Buckland