Hamlet at the Barbican: don’t judge a play until press night
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Version 0 of 1. In theatre, previews are the first draft of a show. I strongly believe that. The only way we can truly tell whether that draft works is by having an audience present. As most audience members at a preview will never see the production again, you want them to be able to connect with it as much as possible. I feel that responsibility deeply, as do all directors and actors, but I also reserve the right to make mistakes as part of my process and correct them as I go along. That’s why I feel angry that reviewers from the Times and the Daily Mail broke the embargo on Hamlet at the Barbican last week and reviewed it on the first performance of its two-and-a-half-week preview period. You need that time, whether it’s three days or three weeks, to identify what’s not working in the production and deal with it. It’s a bit like editing a film: you have test screenings and then you go back and tweak the bits that don’t hang together. The morning after the first preview, the Times critic, Kate Maltby, went on the Today programme on Radio 4 to defend the newspaper’s decision to publish her two-star review. She said that although it’s unfair to criticise things such as energy, pace and the interactions between characters at this early stage, it is OK to criticise the structural changes. She referred to the decision, in this new production, to move Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech to the beginning of the play. Her assumption was that no structural changes would be made once previews had begun, but that was naive. From what experience did she make that assumption? How many preview periods had she sat though? Last year, I staged a play called Hope at the Royal Court theatre, and after the first four previews I changed the beginning entirely. Every single preview period I sat through as associate director at the National Theatre of Scotland yielded structural changes. And it’s not just smaller productions that undergo this process: blockbusters such as Spiderman and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory changed significantly after their initial previews. It’s not unusual for a journalist to completely redraft an article or review, so why should it be strange to do the same to a play? Theatre is a living organism. You only know if your show is working when you see it with an audience. You can also tell when it isn’t working – it’s horrible and you desperately try to figure out how to make it connect. I haven’t seen this production of Hamlet yet, so I can’t comment, although, from a lot of other people’s responses, it’s brilliant. On the Today programme, Maltby said the decision by the Times to review the show on the first night was justified because a rival newspaper had made some kind of deal and would be producing favourable coverage in return for exclusive access. Whether that’s true or not – and the producer, Sonia Friedman, categorically denied the claim – it is sad that they felt the need to take this kind of moral position. Really, it’s all about getting the story first and it’s a shame that the director, Lyndsey Turner, and her company have been caught in the crossfire. The argument has been made that it is unreasonable to expect newspapers to wait three weeks to review this play, especially given the amount of buzz around it. In fact, a three-week preview period isn’t really that long. On Broadway, the plays that I’ve directed previewed for at least a month and these were shows that had already run elsewhere. On Broadway, they have a healthier attitude – they let critics in over a series of nights and then on opening night there are no critics and it’s a chance to celebrate. I don’t think it’s good, culturally, to base all critical judgments on a single performance. I believe very strongly that previews are an essential part of the theatrical process. A first preview is not exactly a pleasant experience for directors and actors. You’re never as raw as when the audience first comes in. It’s like your skin has been ripped off; you feel like a newborn baby. I’m not saying that the audience should feel bad about it. It’s the culture we have created and we need to take responsibility for the audience and make them part of the process. To be honest, I don’t think the negative review by the Times is going to spoil people’s enjoyment of Hamlet. If you’ve flown all the way from Los Angeles to see it, you’re going to have a great time, and that’s fantastic. Of the audience, 99.9% will be unaffected but I’m sad for the people making the work, because it does affect them. I would have been very angry if I were in their position – angry at the moralising, at the sense of entitlement, at the lack of understanding of what previews are for. We can be sensitive souls, us theatre makers, and anger is not what you want to be feeling when you’re working through previews. The hard truth is that the importance of newspaper reviews has declined over the past few years. Now the conversation really begins and ends on social media. When I speak to my peers about responses to a particular show, they say they only take notice of Twitter. In that context, you could see the Times review as a desperate bid to make critics matter again. “Look at us, we can put our thumbs up or down, we do matter!” So there is a crisis, but it doesn’t sound like it’s on Lyndsey Turner’s stage. John Tiffany is an associate director at the Royal Court |