All of Us Are In The Gutter ...

Up at the Edinburgh Fringe, star ratings are everything. At least, that’s what we keep being told in opinion pieces like this one. Obviously, they’re useful to plaster on the promotional material when indecisive potential audiences are drowning in flyers on the Royal Mile or panicking outside the Half Price Hut. The problem is, of course, that nobody nowadays seems to listen to – or even have basic respect for – any star rating below four. Which makes the whole thing nonsensical.

 

In all honesty, there’s nothing essentially wrong with star ratings, it’s just that absolutely nobody – with no exceptions whatsoever – knows how to employ them. Three star ratings are now a badge of dishonour, and there isn’t a theatre company who would feel happy using them in its press. This, clearly, is just a little bit silly: it suggests that the absolute baseline of credibility is four stars and above, ignoring anything below. That means we ignore almost 75% of the possible opinion. That’s like saying that nobody under the age of fifty is worth listening to. Yes, I’m well aware that some of you have no problem with that. But we’re missing out here. The very existence of three stars at the end of a review should indicate something of value. Three stars worth of value, in fact. Hell, you don’t even get three stars on your badge in McDonald’s without seriously impressing the management.

 

Let’s look at things in reverse order. Five stars is the easiest to discuss, since, like standing in a line at for a show at the fringe that doesn’t have relatives of members of the company in it, it’s simply near-impossible to achieve. Five stars should be indicative of the very best of someone’s career: literally, it can’t get any better than this. That being said, we’ve all been guilty of throwing away five stars when we probably shouldn’t have. Even I have to confess doing so when overtired, distracted by a pretty face in a supporting role, and jacked up on far too many Tangtastics.

 

Following that then, is Four Stars. Four Stars is what we should be calling unmissable, what a few too many of us actually think is a five star rating. These are the shows that we excitedly tweet about on the way out, of the venue, the ones that we recommend to our friends when the show tours locally. But they are still not five stars. A four star show is merely excellent. Excellent is something to be proud of. What’s happened, of course, is that in recent years, we have got ourselves trapped in a ‘X Factor’ mentality – apparently, things have to be life changingly brilliant, or grimly awful. We’ve become embarrassed by thinking anything in between. We are now bewilderingly shy of being able to rave about something that we find wonderful while at the same time acknowledging that it needs improvement.

 

If all the above is true (cough: it is), this means that Three Stars is not, as we have tricked ourselves into believing, mundane and invisible, a rating to be embarrassed by. No, three stars is – or, in my not so humble opinion, should be – simply a very good show. As I’ve argued before, in any other industry you have to work damn hard to get three stars. Soldiers returning from battle are continually baffled by the amount of young dance troupes petulantly rejecting their three stars at the fringe.

 

If we accept that a three star rating is actually a hard-won compliment rather than a dismissal, then two and one star ratings can begin to make a lot more sense. A two star rating is for a show that is essentially sound, but fatally or near-fatally flawed by a couple of bad choices: perhaps the lead is horrifically miscast, or the dialogue is overwritten. What those two stars tell you however (or, should tell you, in this alternate universe I’ve just made up), particularly in an environment as volatile and cauldron-bubbly as the fringe, is that although this show has some way to go before improvement, it is still worth your time: the company deserves your attention and feedback so that they can continue to grow.

 

Which leaves us with the one star review. In this version of the world, a one star review would be exactly what it should sound like: a show with at least some merit. Yes, a one star show would be undeniably poor. It might be incoherent, or the jokes would be indistinguishable from the twitter feed of that old school friend you keep meaning to delete – but that one star would suggest that there was at least one saving grace: intelligent direction, perhaps, attempting to throw light on a half-baked script, or a clever set design.

 

I understand completely that I’m a lone voice. The star ratings aren’t going anywhere anytime soon unless you write – as I indeed do – for a site like FringeReview, which has adopted a policy of ‘if you can’t beat them, then refuse point blank to join them’, and has eschewed star ratings altogether. Equally, for those sites and publications that are still using star ratings, companies are only ever going to be interested in ratings of four and five, which, as I’ve pointlessly argued is insane. So it’s down to us to argue more eloquently in our reviews. Now, I’ve been known to dismiss myself as an online hack, but what I’m hacking still has some merit. Well, if not merit, certainly weight. Reviews are at their best when they are a discussion, the development of the reviewer’s own reaction to whatever it is they have seen in the theatre. It’s not good that we can have our arguments and thoughts reduced down into what is essentially a very unimaginative line of emojis. If star ratings are like a reviewer’s version of Schrödinger’s Cat – simultaneously meaningless and vital – then what we write below the line needs to be carefully considered. Lest we forget, the reviewers themselves can now punished (or rewarded) with star-style ratings, via sites like FringePig. A few more of those plastered over reviewer’s profiles could do more to change the ratings system than anything else ..

Thursday 27th June 2013

Right, where were we? The last time we spoke, I was deep in rehearsals for the completely improvised play that I'd been directing, 'A Beginning A Muddle And An End,' I'm not stopping for long here today - at least, I don't expect to be - so for now, I'll simply say that the show, for the most part, seemed to be very well received. 

Well, for the most part. There were a couple of people who clearly hated it. There were also a couple of people for whom improv wasn't exactly their thing, and the production did absolutely nothing to shake them from their beliefs. But they still found the time to hang back and vocalise their admiration for bravery of the cast who threw themselves onstage (sometimes quite literally) with no idea what the hell was going on (again, quite literally). In fact, with this particular person I'm thinking of, I might well be assuming wrongly that they didn't exactly like improv; I'm just reading that into their lack of effusive praise about the actual show. But they were at pains to praise the dedication and cajones of the cast. In many ways, it was this praise that meant more than any compliment regarding clever or funny storylines that the crew came up with. 

Oh, and there was one more section of the audience that didn't exactly warm to us. (by the way, I should point out that the show went very well. There were lots of people that were giddily excited about what the cast came up with. It's just that this particular blog post is about the less flattering elements of the audience). These people had a problem with the show not because they thought it boring, or ill-prepared, or incoherent. In fact, they thought the exact opposite. Rather too much so. In other words, they thought that our improvised show wasn't in any way improvised. 

OK, on one hand - our first reaction, indeed - was to take this as some kind of compliment: the idea that everyone was so-damn-slick that it beggared belief - literally, that it was unbelievable - that anyone could be quite that smart to come up with this stuff without some kind of process or plan. I can understand it, to some degree. As audience members, we're primed to see a structure in our stories - sometimes, literally, a three-act one (a beginning, a middle, and an end, if you will). But, since at least two of our un-believers had actually written reviews taking us to task and, in the case of the particularly bad-tempered one, pretty much accused us of breaking the trades description act, I had been advised by many to exercise my right of reply.  I had been reluctant to do this, simply because a director replying irritably to what's essentially a negative review can come across as a crate of sour grapes. But when our in-house reviewer also raised an eyebrow at the possibility that the show was made up, I was persuaded. 

I won't post my reply here just yet - I'll wait to see if it gets printed in the NVT newsletter first. But the writing of it reminded me that audiences really like to see their improv performers sweat. It can't look too easy, otherwise it just gets drenched in what is, for me at least, one of the cardinal sins of bad improv, a sin that you are capable of even if you're excellent; that of self indulgence. 

Well, more on that another time. The coffee shop I'm stealing internet from closed twenty minutes ago. 

Back To Brighton

I'm in a coffee shop in Brighton making two significant mistakes. The first is having chosen a coffee shop that comes with its own wifi access, meaning that the first real bit of writing that I've done this afternoon is the sentence and a half you've just read, and the second mistae is reading a book called The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide.

It's always the same at this time of year. Having not been at work for a couple of weeks means that I'm beginning to feel - well, you know, a human being, and having spent a week at the Fringe seeing a variety of great (and terrible) shows reminds me how possible it is to do the same. At the moment, my days aren't packed hour to hour with demands on my time, and so, despite my claim earlier, I am actually completing a bit of writing, and my mind is firing on at least two cylinders, trying to work out how easy (or at least possible) it would be to bring a show up to Edinburgh.

It is, of course, all about the time and money. Even those performers and companies that latch on to the valuable free festivals that have become so important in recent years have at least some disposable income to make a month away from real life a viable option. I've always claimed, and indeed assumed, that I'm in no way bitter - that's the way that the cards have been dealt, and in any case, I don't personally know of a single performer who hasn't worked incredibly hard for whatever degree of success they've achieved. But now I'm thinking I may as well get a little bitter. It's something to do, isn't it?

I spoke to a lot of performers this year who had found themselves in terrible shows, the quality of which was reflected in low audience numbers, and savage reviews. One actor I spoke to mentioned the review that the show in which he was appearing. Not only was the review better writen that the show, it struggled to give one star: 'And that was generous,' he muttered darkly. It must be disheartening for a company to repeat a show for at least two weeks of what's one of the world's biggest arts festivals to increasingly dwindling audiences, fighting against the positive word of mouth that's buzzing around - as far as you can tell - any other show in town.

What seemed to link these shows - apart from the fact that they were by all accounts dire - was that they were bankrolled by the director. At this point we should acknowledge that in these cases, 'director' refers only to the person with money and an ego, and not, as you might hope, any detecable charisma or talent. In at least two of these cases, the 'director' was doing the show as part of their PHD. I'm still not entirely sure what this indicates.

All of this doesn't stop me, each year, from coming back to Brighton in a slightly more creative frame of mind, finally working out what cuts and changes are needed in the show that people have been telling me for about ten years now that I really MUST bring to the Fringe, of having new ideas for stories/plays/stand up that invariably jostle for postion alongside the incomplete ideas I had this time last year before real life got back in the way. I often read of all these people who managed to complete their first novel in the half hour between waking up and going to work, and I honestly don't know how they managed it.

This year, then, I'm going to see if there's any value in the small and short. There's plenty of short story and short play competitions out there, all with, if not some critical recognition, then at least cash prizes. In some respect, this is what this blog is about. While there are few things more boring than a writer talking about what s/he's writing about (while they're talking about it, chances are they're no-where near getting to actually writing about it), I can understand why they do it: if they announce they're working on something, they have witnesses. Not an audience, but witnesses - people who can pull them up in a years time and ask them how that novel/play/joke/to do list is going. And if they've got nowhere with it: well, clearly they're not serious about it all.

A Day Off. Sort Of.

Within the finishing line (for me) of Edinburgh this year, as I'll be leaving in a couple of days. I've enjoyed it more than I did last year, although it feels more like hard work this time round - the reviews I've been writing have felt like more of a struggle, particuarly in the instances where I've attempted to review things that are somewhat outside my 'comfort zone'. There have been a couple of things this year that I knew I was never going to review, simply because I liked the performer too much. I'm thinking specfically here of the likes of Daniel Kitson and Josie Long, who I happened to see on the same day. I knew that I didn't want to review them,  just see them as a punter, because I wanted to simply watch them without the need to make notes, and also (this may the more important point) there comes a time when it's entirely pointless to review performers you already expect to like and be positive about. There are a couple of acts this year that, keeping that in mind, I suspect I have written my last review for.

However, I feel like I've become a true Fringe veteran today because I 'almost' had a day off. In years past, I would feel like I was wasting a day up in Edinburgh if I wasn't seeing five or six shows. Considering it takes about five years to truly get a measure of the city, and there can be less than three minutes between shows, this way madness lies. But today was somewhat relaxed, and I had no desire to complicate matters. I still had one show to review at the end of the night, but the rest of the day was fairly empty. Which is not to say that I didn't fill it with a couple of shows anyway - Richard Herring's Talking Cock (actually the first time I've seen him live), and earlier in the day, Angela Barnes and Matt Richardson on the Free Fringe. Both shows were great fun, and both were crammed to the rafters with punters. It's very delightful to see such huge audiences attend shows headlined by performers you have at least a nodding aquaintance with. I'm sure I'll be boring people with 'I knew them' type anedoctes in less than a year.

The other way I know I'm a Fringe veteran actually started a couple of years ago, but I thought I'd gotten over it. However, it kicked in again today (or was it yesterday? It's the Fringe, I have no idea). It's the point where, as an audience member, you begin to take as keen an interest in the sightlines and lighting rig as you do the act on stage. I get frustrated by this, this niggling hope that at some point I might have the chance to bring a production up to the festival. Of course, at the moment, without recourse to a lottery win, this seems to be pretty much impossible.

These latter days of my Fringe visits are the most cruel - surronded by thousands of creative people, relaxed after a couple of weeks off, my mind begins to start actually having a couple of good ideas that might genuinely work as Fringe ideas, and just today I had an idea how to rewrite my Brighton Fringe play from a couple of years ago to get it to a Edfringe-manageable time of at least a hour and a half. Nobody seems to have told my head that in a very short time, it'll be back at work. It seems a shame to let it know ...