Plato's Performance Problem

It is pretty easy to just ignore Plato's thoughts on theatre. Both the printing revolution - which brought his works to international attention - and the internet - which allows clowns like me to give their opinions on them - could be regarded as having changed the relationship between the self and the world to such an extent that Plato's understanding of consciousness belongs to an earlier, and defunct paradigm.

Equally, there are plenty of tricks to get past his objections to theatre: made in his Republic, they are related to his metaphysics of Perfect Forms, a system that has been rejected. Instinctive rejection aside, it is possible to deconstruct the Ideas Realm Plato develops as a foundation for knowledge (I think I am right in calling it an epistemology, a system of understanding) on Plato's own terms. This is a battle that I don't have the correct weapons to wage (like a sharp understanding of Plato's dialectic), but I shall take the possibility on faith.

However, as a theatre critic and someone with a sympathy for Plato's majestic project and ambition (I won't call myself a Platonist, lacking the necessary appreciation of his complex thought), I can't just leave it. It bothers me that Plato, while respecting the skill of the actors, and knowing plenty of the the great classical dramatists' work, would banish them from his ideal state... even if his ideal state is one I would not fancy inhabiting.

Tom Stern identifies three objections to theatre. 

In one: as a work of art, they are detached from the Forms and are just not good enough. If the Form of a chair is the perfect version beyond understanding, the chair made by a carpenter is an imitation - but at least you can sit in it. The chair in a painting, or a poem, or a king in a tragedy, doesn't even fulfil the purpose it was intended for.

In two (and one can be dismissed as a consequence of Plato's metaphysics, which no-one uses anymore): the artist doesn't really know about what they describe, except on the surface.  So they are giving false information.

For bully's special prize: people are stupid and use the arts to define their understanding of life. It's a bit like those people who copy soap opera characters.  Theatre can be a bad influence.

I don't think Plato can be ignored for being a spoilsport. His worry about humans mistaking the surface for depth are consistent in The Republic, and if his belief in truth is a bit old fashioned, it calls to a high respect for human potential. His distrust of theatre is a distrust of distraction - and just like his famous cave story predicts television (sort of), his worries about theatre as deception are trenchant in an era when surface often trumps depth.

On one level, I can imagine Plato's opinions on Strictly Come Dancing. All the celebrity nonsense, the voting, the pairing up of acts, the tacky choreography and the objectification of the dancers would drive him to a rage. He'd hate the false 'liveness' of the weekly event, and decry the artificiality of the project.

But he would be more than a disappointed contemporary dance fan (or, to switch to X-Factor, a fan of Eric Clapton bemoaning the product line of modern pop). He is questioning the notion of authenticity itself itself - and finding it absent in the material plane.
It is a simple step from Platonism to a gnostic vision of reality, in which materiality itself is suspect.

So Plato isn't just picking on theatre: it is a symbol of a problem

with all arts (you can't get off with Botticelli's Venus) and, from here, reality itself. And he is taking theatre seriously: it does change people's minds. In this sense, he respects art more than those defenders of video games who argue that playing Grand Theft Auto doesn't turn players into wannabe gangsters.

The problem is mimesis: theatre is an impersonation of the real. Mimesis - again, as Stern describes - is tough to translate, but includes the ideas of copying and imagination. And Plato is quite correct: the king in a tragedy is not fit for purpose, and can tell the audience nothing.

Five Stars, Four Stars, Three Stars, Two Stars, One Star, Lift Off

Over on Facebook, there is a group dedicated to reconsidering the role of star ratings on reviews. It was born during the Fringe, and features one of the most well-mannered discussions that I have ever read on the internet: professional critics, performers and interested parties presenting their opinions in a courteous and rational way: insight and intelligence grace the posts, and while consensus is absent, mutual respect ad attention is prominent.

Aside from remarking that this might demonstrate the possibility that internet chat need not descend into flame wars - if any group are unlikely to agree on fundamentals, it is critics - I am heartened by the public debate on the role of the review. However, I am not putting my comments on there, because I think that star ratings are a distraction from the more important questions surrounding the profession.

Besides, I don't want to look like an idiot, and most of the posters are far more informed than I am.

The main problems surrounding star ratings is that they are not consistent (five stars from one magazine is not the same as from another) and their use as publicity tools by the companies. Neither of these problems are easy to solve, but for the former, the same problem would apply whatever changes were made: the words "good" and "bad" mean different things, depending on who says them, and the essential subjectivity of any rating system can never be resolved. As for the latter, the problem can only be solved by the companies themselves: the requests for critics to just stop using stars, or the Fringe to monitor their use only defer responsibility.


In any case, there have been anecdotal signs that star ratings don't influence audiences too much any more.

What does emerge from the discussion is an anxiety about the role of the critic, and what reviews "ought" to do. There's the old favourites - less opinion, more description - a few appeals for longer, more detailed reviews, a decrying of those magazines that only turn up at the Fringe and their inexperienced writers. I am sure someone will make the appeal for "a single paper of record" fairly soon.

Now that on-line reviewing has become acceptable, any attempt to determine one single definition of criticism is probably impossible: every critic has their own approach, and this diversity is to be welcomed. In the past, I have been disrespectful of younger critics, students up for the Fringe. I now accept that their voices are not only valid, they are likely to speak to readers who are likely to be bored by my mixture of pretension, crude humour and insistence on seriousness. I have often been irritated by reviews, only to realise they were speaking to a different audience, and that I was being an old fart.

The review - which I expand to include any critical writing - does not have any duty to the company. It  is not there to encourage or discourage audiences, or provide cheap dramaturgy. These things may be by-products of the process. The review isn't even necessarily there to continue the conversation begun by the art work, although I write as if it is. The purpose of a review, or preview, or feature, or editorial, is to be an entertaining and informative piece of writing.

The mixture of "entertainment" and "information" will vary depending on the projected readership.

Taking advantage of the difficulties involved in defining art, I am going to say that criticism is an art form: it's like poetry, only has a distinctive set of conventions. In the same way that it is pretty insulting to expect artists to conform their work according to the use it has to other artists, the idea that criticism has any other function than expressing itself is unacceptable. There is no question that criticism engages in a dialogue with the work that it explores, and the audience, and the broader community: that does not prevent it from being art.

I'll leave it there, hoping that readers will be interested enough to deconstruct or argue against my conclusions.