Who Should The Customer Trust: Jaded Hacks or Ordinary Punters?

People who market theatre shows are too worried about the professional critics. They fret about bad reviews and pounce on good ones for often meaningless quotes. I think they give far more weight to the critics than a typical theatre-goer does.

Many factors affect someone's decision to buy a ticket. A bad review could put them off but, in my experience, if they like the subject, the star or the author, this will be much more influential. Then there's word-of-mouth. Whose reviews would you rely on more when making your decision to go to see a show- professional theatre critics or members of the paying audience? I disagree with Ian Shuttleworth who writes in Theatre Record in favour of the critics.

A paid reviewer himself, he defends his peers against what he imagines are the key criticisms of critics, namely “reviewers offer a distorted view of the plays they write about: we get in free, so we're not beholden to the show, and we're paid to write about what we think rather than how everybody else in the audience seemed to respond.” His response is basically “damned right”.

Actually my concern about professional critics is that, because they get in free, they lose the sense of what going to the theatre is like for “ordinary punters”, as Mr Shuttleworth describes us. For us, the experience starts with choosing a show maybe once a month, based on what we like (genre, actors, writers and so on) and on recommendations. We then go through a sometimes difficult process of buying tickets and journeying and then buying a programme and maybe a meal. All of this is a big investment. Consequently we are predisposed to enjoy the show and if we don’t we will feel the disappointment more acutely.

Mr Shuttleworth says this is why the audience is not to be trusted as much as the professionals. To me, it’s symptomatic that his experience is that “far more often you'll see stuff that's not especially distinguished one way or the other.” On the contrary, I find that the shows I see are generally be good to excellent, which I don’t find surprising given the process they and I go through before reaching the theatre. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have thoroughly enjoyed shows about which I have read lukewarm reviews.

Compared with a regular ticket-buying theatre-goer, the professional critic is a hack who sits through whatever he or she is paid to see, a frothy musical for example even if they would never dream of paying to see such as show. And they see numerous shows each week. “Jaded” may not be a fair word to describe a group of people who clearly love theatre but they are bound to develop a more critical standard than the rest of us and condemn many fine shows to being “average” in their terms.

Professional critics are important. Their experience and knowledge give us insights that are helpful in understanding a play and, when they are enthusiastic, their command of language makes them very persuasive. But I do give more weight to what members of the audience think because their reaction is likely to be closer to my own and therefore more helpful to me. My advice to theatre marketers: Ignore the jaded hacks and encourage audience power.