Critical Mess

You all know the situation: The show’s been great to rehearse, the cast is doing a stellar job, all the design departments are working well together, and the director is the epitome of a benign despot. You start previews, and the audience is with the production from the get-go. The laughs and the pin-drop silences are all in the right places, and the applause at curtain down is long and heartfelt and, more often than not, delivered by a standing house. You’re looking forward to a long run and all the concomitant perquisites.

Then the notices appear, and it seems that the critics were not at the same show. Every aspect of the production, including yours, is damned by a bunch of elderly, out-of-touch idiots who wouldn’t know a hit if it kicked them up the backside, which is exactly what you feel like doing to them as the prospect of long-term royalties disappears down the drain, along with the collective self-esteem of the cast and creative team. It’s certainly happened to me, and, if it hasn’t happened to you, you can be sure that one fine day the ire of some dyspeptic hack will dump well and truly on your head.

The old adage, “If the sound isn’t mentioned, you must be doing a good job,” hasn’t been true for quite a while, but it’s really only recently, with the recognition of sound design as a creative discipline worthy of inclusion in awards ceremonies (pace The Tony Awards committee), that critics have started to pay particular, if sometimes inaccurate, attention to our craft.

Over the years, I’ve become reasonably inured to criticism; it very much comes with the job, and not everyone will like the work that you’ve done for a show, including the actors. My first “public” bad review came early on in my career from Peter O’Toole, when I inadvertently set a level rather too high on a sound-effect of a car arriving. His line was supposed to have been something like, “He’s coming. I can hear his Hispano-Suiza.” What we got that night was “He’s coming. I can hear his Sherman Tank.” Some years later, the late Eric Porter, a fine actor with a commanding stage presence and a voice to match, cornered me during a technical rehearsal for the storm scene in King Lear with the words, “They’ve come to hear me, laddie, not your bloody sound effects.” And, more recently, the luminous and wonderful Dame Helen Mirren commented on an off-stage tea-pouring effect with the memorable phrase (part of which I intend to use as a subtitle, should I ever write my life-story), “Sounds like there’s a horse pissing in a bucket back here.” This was not, I should add, during a performance; she’s much too classy for that.

These you can live with; they’re of the moment and mostly need to be taken in good part, but reviews in newspapers and on television are a different matter and can radically affect the livelihood of those concerned in a production, as anyone who’s been on the wrong end of a bad New York Times review will happily testify. It happens in the UK as well, although not so often, it has to be said. In 1998, I worked on a series of short, comic sketches put together by that master farceur, Michael Frayn, who had just had a major hit with the rather more serious Copenhagen. We toured the show in the provinces before coming in to the West End, and night after night, capacity audiences cried with laughter at the beautifully crafted pieces. We opened in London, and preview audiences echoed the response of their country cousins and howled with laughter, and the opening night was a joy.

Then came the reviews…

I should explain that, in London, all the critics come to the same performance, which is the official opening night. Ostensibly, it’s so that all the papers get the same chance to see and review the show, thus preventing one of them (we have far too many national newspapers for such a small country) getting in first and spoiling it for the others. Total nonsense of course, and as a result, these performances tend to be packed with friends, relatives, backers, hangers on, and, these days, as many low-rent celebs as can be persuaded to attend by the promise of a glitzy after-party, alongside a bunch of glum-faced scribes who are all trying not to give anything away by their facial expressions. Consequently, what transpires on stage is sometimes completely unlike anything that has been before or is to follow.

At this particular first night, despite a flawless performance from our brilliant cast, I suspect that all the critics banded together and decided, rather than lauding Mr. Frayn for his skills both as a serious playwright and a laugh-out-loud comic writer, they’d take the “what’s a serious writer like Michael Frayn doing producing revue sketch stuff like this” route and, almost without exception, a series of po-faced damning indictments duly appeared in almost all of the papers. As sure as night follows day, the show closed early, but up to the last performance, I’d sometimes go and stand at the back, and watch the audiences who had decided to defy the critics, come and see for themselves, continue to cry with laughter, and clap and cheer the cast to the echo.

I’ve also garnered my fair share of poor newspaper reviews, sometimes justified, sometimes inexplicable. One, in a high-profile American trade magazine, reviewing a show that had started in London and subsequently transferred to Broadway, credited me with a sound design that featured “a loud banging noise that occurred throughout the show, seemingly at random.” As this wasn’t in my stock of effects for the show, I remained mystified until I noticed that the review had first appeared when the show opened in London. On the night that the critics reviewed the show, there had been a severe storm, and the theatre’s huge metal scene-dock door had come loose from its mooring and, resisting all attempts to secure it, periodically broke free and slammed hard against its frame during the performance. Rather than re-review the show when it moved to Broadway, the critic had simply repeated the same piece. On another occasion, a drunken row broke out in an alleyway behind the theatre in London’s West End, where we were playing a Noel Coward piece, the sound bleeding through the dock doors and leading one critic to complain about the inappropriate sound effects I’d interpolated into a light comedy.

Sometimes, one can only wonder where, or even if, some critics have honed their craft, or whether they have any idea of what they’re watching. I recall a review of a show that I’d worked on that started out of town, prior to a Broadway opening. The review was in a local paper, and the writer despaired of everything, including the set (too big), the costumes (too dirty), the direction (the actors don’t face the audience all the time), the lighting (too dim), the acting (too naturalistic), and the sound, although I’m not sure why, as there wasn’t any particular reason given, other than that the writer hoped fervently that there had been some kind of a technical hitch; make of that what you will. The day after the review appeared, we got an email from the director, saying, “You’re all sacked, including me and the author.”

Critiquing The Critics

In the past, newspaper critics have been able to hide behind the façade of their respective titles, but these days, they are expected to be accountable to their readership via comments on websites and direct emails, and I happily admit to firing my own views right back at the critics, when the occasion demands, and thus began one of the more bizarre exchanges that I’ve ever had with a critic.

He’d hated the entire show: the concept, the writing, the direction, and most of the acting, and at the end of his review, he wrote, “John Leonard’s sound design requires the actors to lip sync their own voices in a bungled Babel of memory shreds at the end.” Fair comment, you might think, except that it didn’t happen. What did happen, as required by the script, was a voice-over section, to cover the fact that all the actors except one were offstage doing a major costume change for the final scene of the play. When I tasked him with this, via email, he argued with me that it did happen, and I argued back that it didn’t and offered to prove it. His final words were, “Well, there was something about the sound at the end that I didn’t like.” While discussing this with a lighting designer colleague, she commented that she’d had a similar contretemps with the same critic, and his parting shot had been, “Well, I was angry and a bit drunk,” which didn’t exactly inspire confidence in his reviews in the future.

In many of today’s papers and broadcast media, the job of the theatre critic is all too often to entertain rather than inform the reader or listener, and it’s much easier to entertain with a damning review or a withering bon-mot than it is to write a considered piece of constructive criticism. The playwright and director Sir David Hare, reviewing the published diaries of the esteemed British critic Kenneth Tynan, bemoaned the state of some theatre criticism in the UK with some well-chosen epithets, citing the “saloon bar chippiness and trap-shut mind” of one critic and the writings of another as “the piss-elegant fatuities of a crashing narcoleptic.” Harsh words, but almost entirely justified and rather backed up after the death of an elderly critic, when it was revealed that he frequently slept through performances and relied on his wife to write his reviews for him.

Of course, once the notices are out there, there’s little point in complaining, as the damage is already done, although I do know of one producer who threatened to sue the panelists of a television “talking heads” arts program unless they apologized for one particularly harsh and palpably unfair review. He eventually got his on-air apology, too late to save the show, of course, but a moral victory all the same.

And now, of course, we have Internet to thank for a whole raft of uninformed opinions, masquerading as valid criticism. This isn’t helped by publicity-hungry producers who encourage tweets and blogs as a way of spreading word-of-mouth about a show, and the whole thing descends to the realms of farce when a film or television star is shoehorned into a production, and the legions of fans clamor to express their views online. This has led to some bizarre reviews, most memorably for me on a show featuring a young and very famous film actor who happened to own a dog that was almost as revered as he was by his army of followers. Most of the “reviews” concentrated not on the play, but on the star’s facial hair, grown especially for the occasion and which, admittedly, gave the appearance that a small furry caterpillar had taken up residence on his upper lip. Almost equal prominence was given to his dog, which many of the writers claimed to have heard barking and whining in the dressing room. This was finally put to rest by one obsessed fan who, having seen the play five or six times, declared that the dog barked at exactly the same place each time, so it was in all probability a sound effect. I suppose I should have been pleased, except that another commentator praised the realism of the train sound effects, of which there were none, except those generated by the real London Underground trains rumbling past under the theatre.

In 2010, I was sound designer for a revival of John Adams’ musical theatre piece I Was Looking At The Ceiling And Then I Saw The Sky at the historic Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in London. It’s an interesting piece, very complex for both the singers and the band, and never that well received as a performance piece. There’s a rather strange recording on the Naxos label, if you’re interested, but the version that we presented, under the inspired musical direction of Clark Rundell, was a very different beast and about as much fun as I’ve had in a long time. I was blessed with a superb production sound engineer and associate sound designer in Ken Hampton, and an excellent balance engineer in Kyle McPherson, the theatre’s resident deputy chief electrician and sound engineer.

Between us, and along with a brilliant young cast, a stunning band, and sympathetic direction from the theatre’s artistic director Kerry Michael and his associate, Matthew Xia, we did Mr. Adams and June Jordan, the lyricist for the piece, proud. I know that the sound team did a good job because we weren’t mentioned in any of the reviews, but those of our peers who saw the show were unstinting in their praise, and many reviewers mentioned the excellent quality of both cast and musicians and the clarity of the singing. However, one online review damned the production, although it eventually became apparent that the person writing the review hadn’t actually bothered to see it, basing his opinions entirely on the aforementioned recording.

Although it’s often stated that we should ignore the reviews, and many actors will tell you that they never read their notices, it’s not always the case that they are taken so lightly. I once had the great pleasure of seeing one particularly egregious critic seized in a headlock by the mighty Brian Blessed and bodily thrown out of The Dirty Duck (the famous actors’ hang-out in Stratford-upon-Avon), after he’d penned a particularly snide and jaundiced review. More recently, director David Leveaux famously resorted to mild fisticuffs in an altercation with the New York Post columnist Michael Riedel after the latter made disparaging remarks about British directors ruining American musicals. Shortly afterwards, on the first day of rehearsals for Mr. Leveaux’s next Broadway show, his producers presented him with a pair of boxing gloves.

For all those whose lives have been blighted by critics, I can heartily recommend that excellent movie, Theatre Of Blood, in which Vincent Price, aided and abetted by Diana Rigg, dispatches a clutch of critics in a series of entirely appropriate Shakespearean ways. It never fails to cheer me up.

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John Leonard is an award-winning designer who has been working in theatre sound for over 40 years. In his spare time, he records anything that makes an interesting noise in high-definition surround sound. His sound effects libraries are available online at  www.johnleonard.co.uk/immersive.html. Live Design readers receive a 30% discount on all libraries, excepting the monthly Dollar Deals, with the code LDM30.