Like many people, I was shocked when I saw that Beatlejuice, Dear Evan Hansen, and Back to the Future were closing. I was less shocked to see thatWaitress also closed, but I did vote for Rob Mills in Australian Idol once.
Sorry, I don’t mean to be glib. These closures represented the loss of hundreds of jobs. This was months of income unceremoniously cut off as a result of the ‘rising cost of living’. ‘Rising cost of living’ has been the rhetorical fall guy since 2025, a force majeur wheeled out as if it is the answer to a problem and not simply its name. We all shrug and sigh knowingly: “groceries are certainly more expensive”, “the arts have always been a hard road”. Anyway, let’s see how the Neil Diamond musical goes (unironically, it’s quite good). That’s my point: after a week or so of op-eds trying to find new ways to declare a crisis in our arts sector, the alarm bells stopped sounding, life returned to normal, and Bananas are $6 a kilo.
On the periphery of every op-ed about this ‘cost of theatre’ crisis was the theatre critic. Fourth Wall published an article saying that only 41% of media outlets that had published something on the closure of these shows had covered their opening nights - whether in reviews, essays, or interviews. Comedian Christie Whelan Browne posted a TikTok entitled ‘state of theatre’. In it, she called out a reviewer who gave her show, Losing Face, two stars in ArtsHub. Her criticism of that reviewer’s criticism was that he’d told readers that they’d be better served staying home. People rallied around Whelan Browne. Quietly, critics rallied around that critic. To be clear: Whelan Browne’s point represents a misreading of that reviewer, who was instead comparing Losing Face to an SBS show that did everything it was trying to do better. But, alas: two industries, alike in insecurity, locked into a cliché repartee for eternity. ‘[W]e wonder why things are so dire’, reads the caption of Whelan Browne’s video.
Fourth Wall implied that there might be a cause-and-effect between the lack of media coverage and the closure of these shows. Whelan Browne implied that theatre critics have the power to disincentivise audiences and close shows, while belittling a critic.
So I drafted an email to the critics I know, love, and love reading to ask what they thought:
How might we connect these problems in our live performance sector to the problems in our critical landscape?
In these outstanding responses from Ben Brooker, Keith Gow, Nina Culley, Ryan Hamilton, and Charlotte Smee, answers come in the form of more questions: does anyone still read critics? Are we doomed to make the defense of mediocre theatre the litmus test for our cultural landscape? Is solidarity between the precarious theatre maker and the insecure freelancer possible? Will Rob Mills ever subscribe to this Substack?
These responses are joyful and angry; pessimistic and hopeful. It’s been a joy to assemble them here.
Ben Brooker | Withering Heights |
‘Film reviewers,’ wrote Ben Etherington in his memorable 2015 essay ‘The Poet Tasters’, ‘no doubt reach many more people [than literary critics], and probably more directly influence public taste.’ Notwithstanding that ‘probably’, Etherington’s claim may have held a degree of truth a decade ago but – to offer a qualified assertion of my own – I doubt it is true now.
Perhaps, in a dim, distant, past before cultural fragmentation, a Pauline Kael or a Vincent Canby could make or break a film’s commercial fortunes. Not today. I’m unconvinced any critic, living or dead, could have picked a fight with‘Wuthering Heights’’s army of paid influencers and won. Brand loyalty – to Michael Jackson, or Stan Lee, or Christopher Nolan – trumps fidelity to a critical consensus that, in any case, has long-since ceased to exist in an age as solipsistic as it is post-monocultural. These days, the discourse is neither created nor much shaded by critics, whose outlying voices – many of them confined to niche online platforms like this one – can do little more than choke on the PR machine’s plumes of puffery.
Which brings me to theatre, a form even less vulnerable to critical attack – except in the rarified context of festivals, where audiences may still permit the reviewer the marginal role of sales associate – than film. (While we might lament the critic’s inability to dissuade audiences from dreck, their impotence in their other direction should also trouble us, which is to say the equally familiar spectacle of outstanding independent fare going begging for an audience.) As the landscape of commercial theatre in Australia is upheaved by the cost-of-living crisis, leading to much handwringing in the sector, calls grow to abandon evaluative critique altogether (never mind that Beetlejuice, the cancellation of which has come to epitomise theatre’s latest existential exigency, was roundly lauded, including by yours truly). It’s hard not to detect in such calls the sense of a fait accompli: criticism’s final, inevitable, and total subsummation by the gaping, salivary maw of the public relations industry. Thus self-spayed, is it any wonder that our authority diminishes ever further, that the vox-poppification of cultural criticism proceeds apace?
I’ve had plenty to say about boosterism in the past, and I don’t have the space to relitigate those arguments here. Suffice it to say that full-strength praise, when meted out indiscriminately, will ultimately do more harm than good, depleting audience literacy and devaluing the art of criticism itself. I don’t think the critic’s obligations change under conditions of social or cultural austerity. Certainly, we should not now or ever allow ourselves to be conscripted into the kind of astroturfing that plagues culture in this country, a cosy alliance between funders, artists, and media that flattens discourse and renders art just another increasingly unaffordable commodity to be consumed between social media scrolls. ‘The quantum of praise,’ as Etherington put it, ‘does not add up.’
Have critics broken theatre? Nobody listens to us anyway! | Keith Gow | TheatreFirst |
I don’t think people read reviews like they used to. Theatre companies love stars more than quotes. And Google is determined to aggregate reviews on the front page of results, so potential readers aren’t even clicking through anymore. Perhaps the reason theatre is broken is because of the narrowing of spaces for it to be discussed, praised and critiqued.
I don’t think it’s critics who are leading to the breakdown of musical theatre. Most of those shows are impervious to criticism; some people just want to go to the theatre to hear songs they’ve heard before. But why go to see a musical version of a film you have already seen? Does Back to the Future really need to be recreated on stage? Does Beetlejuice, even given the homegrown talent behind it? This breakdown is about money and the cost of living and it’s about a marketplace that is saturated.
Twenty or thirty years ago, musicals came to either Melbourne or Sydney and never toured. Or they toured once they’d squeezed everything they could out of one-city exclusivity. I saw a reel on Insta recently that argued if people travel to the West End or Broadway to see the first run of shows, maybe in Australia they should all start in Melbourne and only tour after that? There might be something to that. Besides, is musical theatre really the canary in the theatre coal mine? I’m not so sure. Those big budgets are hard to recoup in any environment. And not every musical has been stopped dead. Pretty Woman is still going, after all. I’m interested to see if the recent wave of touring plays might be better for the commercial sector; none of those productions are as expensive to produce as the musicals that have recently closed and all are borne of local talent. Death of a Salesman was so successful last year, it’s coming back. A Christmas Carol has become a fixture of Christmas in Melbourne.
In a time when critics are read less and less, it’s hard to imagine how our voices are silencing anything. In fact, we mostly get blame in retrospect. Did Waitress die because of a dearth of positive reviews or was it miscasting or the fact that it’s a musical based on a film hardly anyone has seen? How can criticism be a dying art and the source of theatre’s problems?
Are people even listening to us these days?
Nina Culley
It’s obviously disappointing to hear about the closure of large-scale productions in Australia because it speaks to much larger structural problems within our extremely fragile theatre ecosystem. But I also hope this moment prompts us to ask what we’re trying to sustain.
Thanks to rising production costs and shrinking margins, commercial theatre has increasingly leaned on familiar IP, banking on nostalgia and the only two cohorts it can still rely on: cashed-up boomers and school groups. There’s nothing inherently wrong with populist shows, but when our stages keep recycling the same handful of four-star titles, we’re narrowing the stories, aesthetics and ideas in circulation – and consequently what we imagine criticism is for.
Criticism, thanks to arts journalism’s shrinkage, feels as if it’s mainly become fluffy consumer advice – a maddeningly small ambition for a practice built to interrogate history, politics, identity and one another. When theatre is flattened into a product, the critic is reduced to facilitating (or dissuading) that transaction – which stings, given that most of us are freelancers and artists ourselves, working for scraps because we still think theatre deserves serious public conversation.
London has its own funding cuts and West End flops, but criticism still holds a visible place in major papers and public debate – not because British critics are more virtuous, but because the ecology is larger, denser, and more institutionally embedded. The UK, for example, offers producers a permanent, uncapped tax relief worth up to 45% of production costs, with no cultural test attached (it’s paid out close to £900 million since 2014).
Australian companies, meanwhile, are left begging for project grants that state governments can and do yank with weeks’ notice. UK subsidy isn’t thriving either – over half of subsidised theatre companies here are bracing for a deficit – but at least a chunk of the industry gets to skip the annual ‘fight for its life’ rigmarole, even while the relief keeps rewarding the same IP-driven, safe-bet shows.
If we’re serious about rebuilding Australian theatre, we need to rebuild the ecology around it. That means funding artists and investing in subsidised theatre – one thousand, million per cent. But it also means paying critics properly, commissioning long-form criticism as editorial policy, and treating the institutions that interpret, contextualise, debate and preserve this work as infrastructure not bloody tinsel.
Ryan Hamilton | In The Round | @the.ryan.hamilton |
Today, my feeds are overrun with film bros shitting on Emily Wilson’s review of Nolan’s Odyssey: “Maybe she should just be grateful for what the movie is doing to introduce her favorite subject to people on a massive scale.”
As if it’s the role of a critic to be grateful that art gets made, to applaud the artist because they made art. Well, I refuse: most of your art fucking sucks.
And I get to say that, as someone who sees upwards of 200 shows a year in Narrm. Most of what we make isn’t good enough. It doesn’t live up to what I demand from our artists, from our art forms, and from our stages. I want to see better, and I know you can do it. To call a turd a turd isn’t to say I’m praying for the downfall of our sector, it’s to say (controversially, it seems) that I think our sector might be better off if it wasn’t filled with turds.
Good criticism is a commitment to cultural leadership. Critics harbour a persistently irritating belief that we deserve better: for ourselves, our communities, and our shared culture. And then Christie Whelan Browne turns around and suggests we’re destroying the sector—as if risk-averse programmers, stingy funding bodies, and the media’s persistent defence of mediocrity haven’t done the job for us. Naming an issue isn’t the same as causing it, Christie.
One of the tells of a shithouse critic is an aggrandising attitude towards the magic of live art. That’s not to say their adulation is wrong per se, it’s that these critics often attribute that wonder to the artist, rather than recognising that collective effervescence as the most basic output of any performance. A good critic recognises that the communitas they feel sitting amongst strangers in the dark isn’t reason enough to recommend Waitress. You could get the same feeling at church for free. Probably.
Maybe if artists took an actual interest in the work of their peers you’d recognise what’s going on. You’d start to realise that we can do better too. You’d see that great criticism dares to imagine what art could be, just as the best theatre dares to imagine what our world could be.
One of Australia’s best theatre makers, Wesley Enoch, writes in his 2014 essay ’Take Me to Your Leader’ about Australia’s lack of cultural leadership. A first-class work of cultural criticism, it details exactly how artists have avoided facing up to the part they play in the cultural crises we find ourselves in. He says to artists directly what they refuse to hear from their critics: “If you can’t articulate your work as a vision for a better, more humane society, then give it up. If all you have to offer is beauty and distraction, work harder.”
If you can’t articulate the reason you can’t handle criticism beyond “mean word no feel good”, then give up. If you think critics exist to clap when you drop a turd, wear a fucking diaper. If you’re unhappy with the state of the sector, look in a goddamn mirror. If all you have to offer is mediocrity and lowest common denominator slop, work fucking harder.
Charlotte Smee | Kaleidoscope Journal |
I had many thoughts when Guy asked me to write about how critics fit into this latest theatre “crisis” on Australian stages. We’ve all seen the cancellations (Beetlejuice, tragedy, Waitress, perhaps a blessing in disguise) and we’ve all seen the responses: not enough money! Too much tax! Not enough government support!
There were some responses that placed the blame squarely on critics, interestingly. I don’t think it’s interesting or useful to name and shame, but I do think that it’s part of this broader issue that Australians seem to have with genuine critical engagement and otherwise with cultural literacy.
Relevantly, I’ve been watching Race Around the World on the ABC. It’s fantastic to see a bunch of artists make a short film every week and for people to give them criticism, live. But what I found most interesting is that Margaret Pomeranz appeared on the show twice, and both times she described herself as mean or harsh, when in fact she was giving genuine and considered feedback to the art she was presented with.
There are a number of problems with this that I think are illustrative of the way that artists and everyone else in Australia engage with cultural criticism. In short, we seem to hate it. We think people should get off their high horses and just enjoy stuff, people don’t need to tear others down, people just need to go and spend money at the theatre and turn their brains off. Anyone who thinks otherwise is mean and nasty and we should lock them in a cupboard.
And yet, here’s Queen Margaret doing the criticism anyway. Granted she is the only film critic widely known or left in Aus after her offsider David Stratton recently passed, but despite all the trouble audiences give her we do still somehow recognise that she’s important. Artists need feedback, otherwise what is even the point of making the art? Without an audience, what is a theatre? Without a record, how can we know which production of Hamlet said what and where?
A critic, then, plays a vital role in any kind of artistic crisis. Theatre in Australia has been in crisis since before I was born, so I hesitate to say that there is much new about this latest instalment of the hellhole we live in. 2026 brings with it increasing fascism across the world (and devaluation of art in general), a weakened sector following the pandemic, an unwillingness or inability to spend money on “non essentials”, and a rise of AI slop.
All of these worsen what already existed in Australia, which was an outrageous lack of support or concern for the theatre as an artform, and contribute to a shrinking pool of opportunities for both artists and critics. Theatremakers on Gadigal Country face rising costs and almost no mid career opportunities. There’s Sydney Fringe, then there’s indie theatre, then there’s Griffin or Belvoir after you finish “emerging”. Griffin has four shows a year in their seasons, and Belvoir is a huge step up from making independent theatre. Then you’ve gotta find someone to tell (insert mainstage artistic director here) that your stuff is worth putting on for a plethora of rich, white, aging Sydney subscribers.
Similarly, critics have the options of starting their own blog (incredibly time intensive and unpaid), writing for someone else’s blog or small website (ditto), pitching to Arts Hub (small theatre coverage by nature of budget constraints but doing their best) or Time Out (who have drastically reduced any kind of meaningful theatre coverage since they made their arts and culture editor redundant and smushed the role into one role of “Sydney editor”), or pitching to Sydney Morning Herald or the Guardian (professional level, which still has a small coverage).
For both artists and critics, it’s relatively easy to get started provided you have that all too precious commodity of time. But once you start to develop your skills and you try to engage or develop to a higher level, there is not only no support for you but there is what feels like an active resistance to you engaging on any level more than what is essentially a “hobby”. And it’s definitely not a lucrative one at that.
That’s not to say that it’s impossible, and people do it. I’m one of the insane ones who dips in and out of different criticism styles, types, roles. I must admit I had been feeling pretty hopeless after Time Out lost their editor and my dear friend. But then I was asked to join the Sydney Theatre Awards independent panel as a judge, and I’ve been taking that role as seriously as I possibly can. It’s a change, and it means I’m not writing and publishing as much, but it means I’m still attempting to support and engage with theatre in the most sustainable way for me.
We also mustn’t forget why we do it. In the face of everything I’ve just outlined, there are still people who are willing to give their time, expertise, even love to the theatre. There are days when I’d rather do anything else than go to see another indie show, and those are usually the days that I need it the most. Last Friday I let tears fall down my face in the audience of Brand X’s performance space watching Keila Terencio de Paula tell us about her mother and father in Brazil, and asking us how we will be better ancestors. I remembered, I knew, I can be a better ancestor by championing this work. I can be a better ancestor by writing about this work. I can be a better ancestor by going home and doing my piano practice. I can be a better ancestor by going to work and helping people fight their bosses. I can be a better ancestor just by trying, continuing, never giving up the fire. I can.
The crux of my argument is really that the plight of the critic and artist are one and the same. Without critics, art (and especially theatre) goes unrecorded, unappreciated, underseen. And without artists, critics and humanity have almost nothing left worth doing.
So what can we do in the face of a never ending crisis?
Join your union (the MEAA is lobbying the government for increased support to major musicals, and while not perfect it’s something), engage with theatre (spend whatever you were going to spend on Beetlejuice or Waitress on 5 or 6 shows at Sydney Fringe, 2 shows at the Hayes or 4 shows at almost any indie theatre in Sydney), and talk about your opinions about art. Write a meaningful Letterboxd review, talk to your friends about what you liked or didn’t like, practice going to things you might not like and developing your taste. In the face of crisis, being culturally engaged is one of the most radical things you can do.
If you’re an artist or a critic, even as an unpaid gig, record it on the upcoming Census. Be specific, say what and when and how you do it. Data allows us to show governments and organisations we exist, and this helps immensely when paired with being annoying to your local MP.
But don’t stop there. Don’t ever shut up about it if it matters to you. Keep asking questions. Keep sending letters to MPs. Keep telling your friends about it and forcing them to come with you to the theatre, the cinema, the art gallery, your mates gig.
Most importantly, do not do it alone. No one can make change on their own. If we concentrate on division, negativity, misunderstandings, we do ourselves a disservice. Welcome feedback, criticism, genuine engagement. I’m still practicing this, so I know it’s hard, but I promise we can always always learn more from each other.
The horrors persist. But so must we, together.
Guy Webster, this Substack etc. etc.
To take a break from being rage baited by Whelan-Browne’s TikTok call out, I read Jonathan Kramnick’s 2023 book, Criticism and Truth. It’s a book about literary criticism. But when Kramnick writes that ‘the interpretive act of criticism is inescapably creative’, I thought of theatre reviewing. His point is that literary criticism, by sharing the same form as its object, also shares in its mode of creativity; it creates a new textual object out of its critical engagement.
A text creates a text.
What is the equivalent for the theatre critic, who doesn’t share the form of its object? What would a mode of criticism that matches the theatricality of theatre look like? What frustrated me about Whelan Browne’s reaction is also, ironically, what endeared me to theatre in the first place: its insularity and its preference for the dramatic. These are the conventions that play out between theatre criticism and theatre maker every couple of months, usually in ways that overpower the critic’s authority to overvictimise the theatre maker. Of the one thousand or so responses to Whelan Browne’s video, one comment near the top stood out to me:
‘Yes!!! Hahaha you’re so bloody right. Reviewer enjoyed the comp ticket and forgot the goal of their job (and all of ours) is to create and impact and entertain. Thanks for nothing.’
The irony is that this reviewer did create something; their two-star pan had an impact that entertained, enraged, and engaged readers because it was a two-star review. I’m not so ignorant to think that this engagement discredits the economic impact negative reviews can have. But I am jaded enough to doubt, as Keith Gow does in his response for this Substack, how extensive this impact was on Losing Face and how negative its long-term impact on the cultural landscape really is. Unsurprisingly, I believe that a negative review is essential to a thriving, healthy critical landscape and more conducive to forming the kind of literacy that encourages life-long engagement with the arts than positivist boosterism. By that same token, I believe actor call out posts and Tik Toks are also essential. Can we make this fairweather reaction economy generative to our critical landscape in the long term? Can we use its drama to deepen theatre-going and elevate its cultural standing? Can we find solidarity and joy by talking about these reactions in theatre lobbies, Discords, emails, Substacks (lmao)?
The problem is that criticism is ill-served when it is evaluated purely from the point of view of the theatre maker. The effect is a reaction economy that is momentary and one-sided - a monologue asking nothing of you but to nod in agreement. Thinking about the role of the critic as I read ‘skyrocketing costs’ and ‘slow ticket sales’ cited as the two reasons Beatlejuice, Back to the Future and Waitress were closed, I was reminded of the idea of critical authority. Critical authority is that ineffable juice that makes audiences seek out one particular critic, and it often helps to legitimise their critique (at least, in the eyes of a reader). Critical authority was associated with that storied (and now tired) idea of the critic as taste maker and gate keeper: the dilettante with a pen wielded like a loaded gun. That idea has been thoroughly dismantled. This dismantling was initially motivated by an earnest desire to democrastise criticism and challenge the reductive power dynamics that sustained it. Everyone’s a critic, etc. But, at worse, this furnished a culture-wide belittling of critical expertise and its forms and histories, eroding public trust in the critic and overpowering the theatre maker as the authority on their work.
The irony is that critical authority still exists today; it just forms less out of a specific method of critique than from the success of a specific mechanism of attention. Critical authority is attained (or maintained) by mechanisms that direct, focus, and capitalise on our attention. We value more visual forms (Reels, TikToks) or authentic styles of delivery (a cult of personality criticism, user-facing engagement, soft ambience), click-bait titles and subheadings. This isn’t new and it’s not necessarily a problem, but a call out like Whelan Browne’s underlines a gap between critical authority that results from good critique and one that merely assumes the aesthetic and stylistic cues of ‘Critic’. Our overemphasis on positivist critique - ‘full-strength praise’, as Ben Brooker writes - and relativity - that clichéd dogwhistle, ‘it’s just one person’s opinion’ - has eroded the critic’s power to critique and empowered the theatre maker’s power to critique them. It has made the difference between the review Whelan Browne is responding to and her response moot. According to the logics of online criticism (and I’m generalising here!), Whelan Browne is just as much a critic as that reviewer. I don’t think that’s true, or helpful to what brings them both together: the love of an artform, and the desire for a secure labour force.
I’ve said this before but theatre makers react to critics as if those critics have somehow resolved the labour precarity they’re subject to; as if their power to criticise them reflects an institutional, cultural, or economic power and security. My response to Whelan Browne’s call for people to come to the theatre and see her middling show is for more people to read criticism and for theatre makers to read criticism better. We all agree that we want audiences to see shows. Don’t answer labour precarity by amplifying the precarity of others. I want a reaction economy that is fun and enraging. But I want it to be founded on an earnest belief in the essential value of critique. I worry that someone reading the review Whelan Browne called out only learns how to dismiss the writer’s work outright while they comment support for a show they still can’t afford. They don’t learn how to understand the style and form of this criticism. Maybe that’s utopian of me, but I do wonder how we might make people believe that an attempt to understand criticism matters. The overvaluing of positivism and boosterism has eroded public trust in critics and countless viral callouts have not affected change. For every infographic maligning criticism as a practice there has been an arts publication that has gone under.
The answer rests in challenging these tired reactionary modes that reuse belittling rhetoric and so insentivise the belief that criticism does not matter. I want to write in a culture that’ll read me just as much as Whelan Browne wants to perform in a culture that’ll come to her show.
Maybe that means reimagining critical authority in ways that do not dismiss outright The Critic. The Critic is important to connecting audiences to shows and incentivising the cultural impact of that connection (and so the shows themselves). When we’re talking about the cultural value of theatre, we need to talk about the systems that ascribe or affirm that value; we need to talk about how we might make something as intangible, relative, and dynamic as cultural value something people care to ask. In my opinion, this is the long-term impact of a two-star review: it makes cultural engagement feel like it has stakes to it. As a result, it facilitates a beautiful thing both theatre maker and critic want - it extends the time audiences spend engaging with a show.
When the MEAA requested “the need for stronger protections, greater accountability and better support for arts workers” in their response to these closures, I don’t think they meant that a negative review represents a lack of support for the workers in commerical theatre. A two-star review provides more support for our theatre landscape in the longterm than is often considered. A TikTok callout underlines, and contributes to, that support as it snowballs from TikTok reactions into lobby conversations; from email threads to a Substack that compiles responses from our best Critics trying to be better writers, and trying to live.
A text creates a text creates a text.
Such a lot of work in this post, and so many valuable ideas from you and the contributors. Thank you! I’m not really part of the theatre world - and only see the odd show - but these are conversations we need more of throughout the Arts.
I just wrote this review of Bourne’s contemporary ballet! Perhaps you’d like to read. https://desolationblue.substack.com/p/different-gear-still-speeding-bournes