Critics live to write another day

The word was that it was going to be a blood-bath. The critics were going to be cut to pieces by theatre practitioners disgusted by various festival reviews. Instead, Greeting The Critic, a seminar organised by the UCD Drama Studies Department on the "value, role, creativity and challenge of newspaper criticism", which was held yesterday in Carysfort, was a civilised, interesting, well-timed, and only sometimes woolly discussion of newspapers and theatre.

The contribution which galvanised and elevated the whole debate was that of Lynda Henderson of the Drama Studies Department at the University of Ulster, and once editor of the sadly defunct magazine, Theatre Ireland. She lambasted the idea that the reviewer should work as a tipster, telling people what they should or should not see: this she described as "just awful". What the reviewer should do instead, she said, was stimulate the readers' awareness of their own response: "Consciousness is the key and the means to raise consciousness is inquiry and interrogation. The critic must enable people to interrogate themselves. Can they do that in the culture in which they're trapped? No, of course they can't."

Asked was this new role for the reviewer not totally unrealisable in a world where people are looking for tipsters before they pay out substantial amounts of money for tickets, she agreed that within the current theatre and newspaper culture it wasn't - but it was worth discussing as a way of challenging that culture. Critics would always fail us, she said, because they were not ourselves, and everyone's response is different.

There was some criticism of the standard of theatre reviewing in this country. One speaker from the floor suggested that during the festival, everyone from the farming correspondent to the cookery columnist got drafted in to review. Bruce Arnold, Chief Critic with the Irish Independent, staunchly defended his choice of critics. Seamus Hosey of RTE said that when he read David Nowlan's review in this newspaper of The Secret Fall Of Constance Wilde at the Abbey he wondered had they been at the same play: "I really despair sometimes, as someone who cares passionately about the theatre, about the standard of reviewing in our national newspapers," he said. "And I don't exempt our national broadcasting service."

He complained that Nowlan had not mentioned the name of the actor who played Bosie in the play. Here I could be helpful, explaining that the reference was cut out overnight by a sub-editor. It read: "Andrew Scott's Bosie is suitably shrill and not at all affecting, although his stage presence is always compelling."

Karin Mc Cully, literary director at the Abbey, spoke of a "sense of betrayal" by the critics: "We feel you must understand what it takes to bring a text to life and a highly developed sensibility and passion."

Novelist Dermot Bolger described himself as "liberated" by starting off with the assumption that the critics wouldn't like his work - what he hated was, however, when they wrote about something he hadn't written at all. Fellow playwright Jimmy Murphy admitted that writers and critics could not have a cosy relationship - they were liked when they wrote well of your show, and not when they didn't: "May the critics continue to disagree with each other," he said. "May they make us fume with rage and crow with delight."

And so it's nearly over, and why not end it with a funeral? The Dublin Cycling Campaign is hosting a funeral for the Luas, cycling lanes and bus corridors, on the last weekend of the festival and theatre people are being asked to come along dressed in sober black and ready to keen; the procession starts in Temple Bar Square at 12 p.m. on Saturday, and follows the coffin past Public Enterprise Minister Mary O'Rourke's office and on towards its sea burial. Folly that by seeing the extra performance of Gare St Lazare's Molloy which has been scheduled for Andrews Lane at 5.45 p.m.