Let's begin this week's roundup with a "bold and stupid" act from director Tony Adams. At the Jay Raskolnikov blog, Adams responds to a negative review of his current show, The Other Shore, by offering a full refund to any audience member who agrees with it. His complaint is not so much that the critic did not like the production, but rather that the review is factually inaccurate and makes a number of statements about the piece which, he argues, no vaguely attentive member of the audience could possibly believe.
As Andrew Haydon has discussed on his blog, it's generally seen as bad form for artists to complain publicly about bad reviews; that sort of thing is usually kept to the confines of the dressing room or the theatre bar. But I know from experience how frustrating it is to read a review of your work that seems so wildly inaccurate that it is hard to believe that the writer actually bothered to turn up to the show. So Adams is to be congratulated for putting his money where his mouth is.
However, there does come a point when artists simply have to let go. David Jays at Performance Monkey makes this point brilliantly, pointing out that Ibsen's Peer Gynt had a big fan in none other than ... Adolf Hitler. The moral of this, he says, is that although critics often get told that they have misunderstood something, "the figure of Hitler-the-fanboy reminds us that no author or stage artist can control interpretation of their work: audiences take what they need from a work of art. And what they take may be terrifyingly partial or boneheaded; they may even find greater richness and subtlety than the work deserves".
In other news, regular readers might remember that Noises off recently reported on a campaign to encourage Obama to create a cabinet-level Secretary of the Arts position. It seems that not everyone thinks this is a good idea. Culturebot draws attention to an article by David Smith in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that the making of art is a uniquely individual enterprise and could therefore be harmed by increased centralisation. But does it have to be this way? After all, the UK manages to have a cabinet-level secretary for culture, but when it comes to questions of funding, the arm's-length principle embodied by Arts Council England means that central government actually has very little control over the specifics of what artists do.
Finally, the blogs have been abuzz with talk of Obama's inauguration. The fact that up to 2 million people travelled across the country to stand in the freezing Washington cold simply to hear a politician speak has been taken as a sign that theatre-makers have no one to blame but themselves if no one is coming to see their shows. The Mission Paradox picks up on another blog by Tony Adams, about what the theatre can learn from this event, and summarises his argument like this: "If they don't come ... IT IS YOUR FAULT." After all, if the inauguration demonstrates anything, it is that "people still have a very real need to experience things together ... and a very real need to experience things live".
