Young Critics Thoughts

Tramway's Young Critics' programme starts up again this week: I am delighted to back from my holiday for my weekly session, but I have spent some time over Christmas assessing what I am trying to achieve in passing on my wisdom (insert self-deprecating comment here) to the next generation. I mean,  I am used to the problems of working with an unpopular subject (insert Latin teacher comment here), but criticism isn't one of the jobs that tends to come up when the career's guidance lecturer arrives (add comment about how if it had been, a generation of students would have been saved from being drilled in grammar).

I have a passion for criticism: I got very excited in Lyme Regis when I found a compilation of British Theatre Criticism from the 1960s in the bookshop hidden behind the Cobb. Back in school, I thought that the script would reveal to me all that I wanted to know about a play - that's the influence of English Literature A Level (include boast about how many obscure plays I found in the library during free periods). I wonder whether the bitterness I express about the hegemony of the text comes from that old belief, especially since I have experienced, even in the past six months, plenty of good plays that came from scripts.

A few years ago, I was researching the history of Tramway, and it was only the reviews and previews that gave me any idea of how Tramway was regarded in the late 1990s. It is a puzzle, putting together pieces from different writers, many still working today (is a comment about wanting their jobs too much?), and getting an impression of particular performances from multiple sources. These days, the Internet allows me to check several different reviews of the same play at a click of the mouse (slap at The Times for their paywall). Using criticism is a far more immediate way of understanding what a play is about, and in many cases, the only documentation.

Admittedly, I still read scripts for research - that NTS one about the aging nuns was the most recent (check name on NTS site) - but they give me nothing of the emotional experience. Sure, the script allowed me to recognise the skill of the author and follow the themes more closely. But is a blueprint for something, not the thing itself. The map is not the territory.

On a purely selfish level, the Young Critics sessions lead to more criticism for me to read: when they published the last issue of Clingfilm, there were competing opinions printed side by side. It's rare that the same publication will present conflicting views, so they've got a USP right there. Plus, the articles are in voices that are not usually given space (a film critic talks dance, an artist responds to an exhibition). I wish I'd done something more to put my name all over it, because I think that issue is going to be vital in someone's research in the future.

The real difference between the teaching I did in schools and the teaching I do at Tramway is that I am not looking for the correct answer anymore. John Zorn says that there is something disappointing in the way that education refuses to accept mystery, and emphasises the answer, the resolution. Much as I would love to lead an army of critical clones, that isn't how it works (no student is seriously going to follow the ideas of their teacher). I hope I am just giving a space for something new to emerge.