Shortly after I filed my first theatre review for The Irish Times I received a phone call from Deirdre Falvey, who was arts editor at the time. She had a small query: she wasn’t sure whether I liked the show.
After a short conversation we decided this was a moot point, but I kept her note in mind the next time she commissioned me, and almost two decades later I still do, even as I believe that a critic’s personal response is not an essential element of a good theatre review.
With her query in mind, I make sure to choose adjectives that convey enthusiasm or dismay, so that a reader won’t have to work too hard to know whether I “liked” a performance, but a theatre critic’s job, I have learned through practice, is not merely evaluative.
A theatre critic’s job is not just to suggest if the reader should see something or not but to inform a potential audience why they should; why, even when the work fails to achieve its artistic ambition, it is worth considering.
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All art is a conversation between the artist and the world, a reflection of what they see, or want to see. A piece of cultural criticism is the world answering back.
Approaches to theatre criticism were one of the topics up for discussion at Mission Critical, a symposium, supported by The Irish Times, that was held at the Abbey Theatre towards the end of 2025. It brought together leading Irish and international theatre critics to discuss what is widely thought of as a crisis in theatre criticism.
The participants included Arifa Akbar, chief theatre critic at the Guardian, Ben Brantley, who was lead theatre critic at the New York Times for 20 years, and Nancy Durrant, one of the hosts of the London Theatre Review podcast. As they spoke about their experiences of writing and broadcasting about theatre, criticism, internationally at least, seemed to be in rude health.
Perhaps the crisis suggested by the symposium’s title is actually a national one; the fact that only two Irish theatre critics were among the 14 panellists certainly suggested so. To borrow Captain Boyle’s assessment of the world in Seán O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock, theatre criticism in Ireland is in a state of chassis.
When I started thinking about theatre criticism as a discourse, being a theatre critic seemed to be a plausible, if precarious, potential career. The Irish Times alone had three senior writers regularly covering the theatre beat across the country.
One of those was Fintan O’Toole, whose Second Opinion column offered an alternative perspective to the lead theatre review that week: not only was a play worth talking about; it was worth talking about twice.
The daily red-top newspapers employed theatre critics too. One of my first engagements in a critical capacity was as a judge for the Evening Herald’s Dublin Theatre Festival awards. I had just finished school and won a place through an open competition to find a “public” representative, a democratic counterpoint to the tabloid’s professional reviewers.
All the Sunday supplements also held exclusive space for theatre reviews. There was even a glossy quarterly journal, Irish Theatre Magazine, dedicated to the art form.
These multiple print-industry responses to theatre productions were a boon for artists and audiences alike. Theatre reviews could help artists sell their shows and apply for funding. They also allowed artists to see how their work was being read by invested audience members – critics who knew the context in which they were making art.
There are theatre critics who have worked through the digital challenges and adopted new models of sharing their work while being paid for it
With feedback from various voices, theatre criticism fed into artistic self-reflection: was the meaning the artist was striving for through performance clear? Ultimately, a climate of considered criticism contributes to better art.
For readers, meanwhile, the consistency of critical coverage positioned theatre as an art form worth consideration. In this healthy discursive context, theatre was newsworthy. With multiple opinions on offer, readers might also develop a relationship of trust with one reviewer or another. Agreement wasn’t the point: faith in a critic’s fairness was.
Also significant was a critic’s own writing style. At its best a theatre review, as a piece of writing, is an art form in itself.
In the years since my first review was published, however, space for theatre reviews in traditional media has been shrinking. Only three print publications in Ireland give them regular space today, and beyond productions by established artists and at the principal theatres, or in the context of events such as Dublin Theatre Festival and Dublin Fringe Festival, the work of many theatre artists is no longer evaluated by critics, online or in print.
How and why did this happen? Globalisation is one answer. In Ireland, theatre has been a physical site where the cultural politics of the emerging nation were played out.
That could be ideological, as with the riots that accompanied the premiere productions of The Playboy of the Western World and The Plough and the Stars, for example, or the arrest of Alan Simpson, of the Pike Theatre, after the premiere of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo, as the opening play of the first Dublin Theatre Festival, in 1957.
Or it could be dangerously real: the press that the 1916 Proclamation of Independence was printed on was supposedly hidden under the floorboards of the main stage at the Abbey Theatre; guns belonging to several rebel actors certainly were.
With uncertain national politics giving way to Celtic Tiger confidence in the late 1990s, and the internationalisation of culture thanks to the internet, the idea of a national audience has become ever more diffuse, diluting the potential impact of speaking to a theatre audience as “one”, while decimating the audience itself.
The internet has created an online world of endless distraction and on-demand entertainment. Theatre as an art form has struggled to compete.
[ Abbey Theatre announces centenary Plough and the Stars production for 2026Opens in new window ]
The internet also created a cult populated by a different type of criticism. Social media has been the great equaliser: online, everyone is a critic. Five stars for digital democracy. Opinion is not the same as criticism, however: criticism brings context as well as judgment.
In a bid to be heard above the digital noise, criticism was forced to make itself more clickable. Editors embraced star ratings and shorter formats in a bid to attract readers, but this devalued both theatre criticism – star ratings forcing a less nuanced, more simplistic assessment – and the professional critic.
With newspapers struggling to adapt to the precarious economic model of the internet age, critics – a largely freelance cohort of specialists – have struggled to earn a living. In Ireland, the theatre critic is a hobbyist; theatre criticism is something to be squeezed between the demands of your other work.
With opportunities shrinking, many have left criticism altogether, transferring their years of accrued expertise in Irish theatre into a parallel career (in academia, say), if they are lucky, or adapting their critical skills to a different industry.
Economic precarity has made for a privileged pool of potential critics, as well as for a critical dialogue that lacks the diversity seen on stages across the country these days.
One solution mooted at the Abbey event was that critics be made eligible for the Basic Income for the Arts scheme, in recognition of the essential part they play in the artistic ecosystem – the other part of the conversation invited by the dialogue of live performance.
In the meantime, there are theatre critics who have worked through the digital challenges and adopted new models of sharing their work while being paid for it, through the subscription models of services such as Substack.
In the unlimited online arena, there have also been international innovations that have tackled the crisis of criticism’s inherently limited subjectivity. The online magazine 3 Views on Theater, for example, provides exactly what the title suggests for every show it reviews.
But these are discrete and individual solutions to a problem that needs a broader, infrastructural solution. Without robust, informed, intelligent and fair theatre criticism, both artists and audiences are missing out.
