Critics and their audiences: The rhetoric of reviewing

摘要

As theatre critics for UK newspapers write their daily/weekly reviews, what audiences do they write for? This article considers a number of different contexts for newspaper reviews and their constituencies of readers. Beginning with a moment of reversal (director as critic, critic as director), it moves through the dramatization of the actor's response to bad reviews in the play-of-the-film Theatre of Blood, before analysing ways in which scholars' uses of theatre reviewing fails to recognize the circumstances of consumption for which the reviews were written. The article then analyses examples of the presentation of reviews (Vox Pop quotes and star ratings), especially in relation to the production of Hamlet starring Jude Law, and the impact on reviewing communities (writing, reading, the writer as reader) consequent on the development of the theatre reviewing blogosphere.View full textDownload full textKeywords Theatre of Blood , Michael Billington, Kenneth Tynan, Theatre Record , bloggersRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2010.497853