Hello Matt! Post Critical Team Sports, anyone?

In an interesting video blog, Matt Trueman suggests that criticism can be a team sport. He covers the challenges of the internet age, but then suggests that each review ought to refer to previous reviews of the same show, developing a kind of dialogue between critics and the work, and avoiding duplication of content


So, I am going to respond to one of his articles and see what happens. Apart from being sued by Fest for ripping off a big chunk of their copyrighted material...

The Post Show

By Matt Trueman

Published 05 August 2014 In Fest

This semi-improvised post-show talk is an almost-inspired format

How has no one done this before now? An improvised post-show discussion. The format’s inspired: recognisable, structured and ripe for ridicule.

Actually, someone totally did. Rob Drummond and David Overend did it at The Arches. But, interesting, Trueman and I start with the same statement, that the idea is ripe for comedy. Here's my introduction...

The painful tradition of the post-show discussion is ripe for deconstruction: playing on the vanity of the artists, it invariably becomes a dreary round of predictable questions and self-satisfied responses. Under the guise of the Shallow Scream Ensemble, The Berserker Residents have fun sending up the pretension of the serious artist, without delving deeper into the processes of creation.

The company display a real skill in improvising to the audience's questions, before segueing into a series of scenes that expose the actors' neediness and vulnerability. Aiming for broad comedy rather than insightful takes on the theatre industry, Post Show is more slapstick than satire, and entertains through the absurdity of the characters and their desperate attempts to wrest meaning from their mundane anxieties.

Of course, we haven’t actually seen the show under discussion and the actors haven’t actually performed it. It’s only through our questions—Could you just explain the half-hour section in Spanish? How did you manage to piss off both Christians and Satanists?—and their fanciful answers, that the full horror of what’s just occurred onstage becomes apparent.

Synopsis... nice and clear, too. 

We enter just in time to catch the tail-end of the final scene: a bafflement of backstories, unseen characters and established conventions. Tonight, it’s Prodigal Father: a six-hour tale of two brothers, their comatose mum, abusive dad and a physical theatre "safe space". Also, it seems: raft merchants, yoga instructors and, er, a demon mother.

Actually, this team criticism is kinda boring. What can I add to this? It's all there... he's right. Synopses are unnecessary to be repeated. Back to my response, I think.

The audience are guided into the auditorium with the performance already in progress: the tail end of a Sam Shepherd-style conflict of masculinity which has apparently been running for the previous six hours. Cutting quickly to the post-show discussion, the show proper reveals the emotional traumas, egotism and neuroses that drive the production.

Yet, brilliantly, the three members of "Shallow Scream Ensemble Theatre Collective" justify every element with that laughable luvvie indulgence. Whatever you throw at them—dance sequences, deus ex machina—they’ll defend the decision to the hilt, convinced of their own genius.

The company display a real skill in improvising to the audience's questions, before segueing into a series of scenes that expose the actors' neediness and vulnerability.


As so often with improv, though, you wish The Beserker Group were stricter with their resorts to surrealism. The more plausible the play, the better the comic bullseye.


However, The Post Show is only semi-improvised. Here and there, it swerves into scripted sketch territory and, while that can be amusing on its own terms, it does confuse the form. Moments you thought improvised turn out to be plot points and, for all the laughs, you leave feeling duped.


Aiming for broad comedy rather than insightful takes on the theatre industry, Post Show is more slapstick than satire, and entertains through the absurdity of the characters and their desperate attempts to wrest meaning from their mundane anxieties.