Charles Spencer’s review of Snookered

Charles Spencer, theatre critic at the Telegraph began his review of Snookered with this: “When one thinks of young male Muslims in Britain today, I suspect the first image that comes to mind is of indoctrinated fanatics heading to London from the North with explosives in their rucksacks.”

On his blog, Nimer Rashed takes issue with that sentence and writes: “My problem with these words is not only that they rehearse a dangerous cliché, encouraging and perpetuating a misguided consensus, but also that they’re part of a response to piece of theatre. When our brains start to process an idea, as any writer knows, the first words and images drawn from our imagination are likely to be the least trustworthy, the least original, and the most prone to generalisation. They’re facsimiles of experience: photocopies, counterfeits.”

And yet how many people act on those initial responses?

Nimer goes on to make a fair point when he writes: “The problem with Mr. Spencer’s paragraph is that it takes the complex strands of experience, the connective tissue that links us together, and ties it into a tiny knot of hate. It acknowledges the divisiveness of “us and them” and, in its assumption that this is the de facto consensus, enshrines this oppositional position as absolute.

And it does all this with three little words. “When one thinks” is a pernicious phrase – it encourages prejudice without accountability. The inclusion of “one” (not “I”) carries an entitled assumption that this is the way we think: the common view, the status quo, shirking complexity in favour of cliché. “One” claims to speak for the many, but instead speaks for no-one in particular, and is wholly unaccountable. It is groupthink, and it is extremely dangerous.”

Here’s my take on it. Spencer is a critic. Critics write about “the audience” or “viewers” or “listeners” or indeed “one”, they generalise. They try to tap in to the zeitgeist they perceive and give us an idea of what they like, so that in relation to them we can decide if might like it too. But the only really useful way to do this is for them to be honest and to engage with the art they’re criticising and Spencer has done both of those in his first sentence.

He follows “when one thinks” with “I suspect”. Suspect, not know. He’s taking a risk, talking to his readership as well as making a real effort to understand the play and give his opinions of it a place in the world beyond theatre. In doing this, he has tapped into the theatre zeitgeist and dared to suggest that we might not be as over our prejudices as we like to think – a brave, necessary comment to make in an industry that can be very introspective and stagnant with a muddled view of what progress means.

He proves my point about stagnation when he writes “one longs to learn more about his (Billy’s) affair with a white girl and its consequences.” Now, this theme has been done to death. How much more sensation can be squeezed out of conservative parents and their take on interracial relationships? But Spencer suggests that actually, theatre audiences (along with himself) might like a bit more please. I would hope that’s not true but nonetheless, we need more mainstream critics to be as honest and engaged as Charles is with the first line of his review even if they’re rehashing old clichés we wish were over.

Here’s my review of Snookered.

On Progress: Iqbal Khan

Last week Spoonfed kicked off their On Progress series. It’s an exploration of the question ‘how should we measure progress in theatre?’ At the moment, we tend to hold up a lot of anecdotal and statistical evidence to demonstrate how theatre is progressing and becoming more diverse. I’d like this series of articles to be a collection of thoughts from people who are cited as examples of progress, to garner their thoughts on how we should measure inclusion/progress/diversity.

 Our fist contributor is director Iqbal Khan who had the following to say:

Think of the days of Sir Arnold Wesker and Edward Bond; we are not there now and it’s a shame. It’s a shame that theatre doesn’t feel more radical. It’s feeling more and more chic and we could do more to encourage the other voice to be other, to be true to its otherness.

For instance the play I’m doing now, Snookered, is written by a taxi driver [Ishy Din] and he keeps talking about how ignorant he is of the theatre business and how much he has to learn. He’s written a play that is extraordinarily vital. It’s true to the voices of the people that he grew up with. Now, he could learn something about structuring his play but there’s nothing he needs to learn about the voices of the people in his play because that’s got nothing to do with taste; it’s to do with truth.

But he feels intimidated a little into making sure the theatrical establishment welcomes his voice. I think actually they need to ensure that he understands he doesn’t need to do that, that they need his voice more than he needs theirs. Everything I can say to him in terms of guiding him in that journey is to try and protect his individuality. He’s written four parts for young Asian actors that are incredibly muscular, complex and unsentimental.

One of the things Nicholas Hytner first talked about when he took over at the National was interrogating the idea of what a ‘national’ theatre is, whether it’s necessary, and who and what it represents. That kind of ambition being explicitly stated and being up for debate is the sort of ambition that big theatre venues need to continuously engage in. And it’s a threat, it’s intimidating, but it’s necessary if it’s going to keep the form urgent and question pervading ideologies.

Wesker wrote about what the ambitions of theatre should be. He said you judge the quality of a piece not by its situation, not by the event dramatised within it, but by the quality of a writer’s perception of that event. That’s what makes something profound and timeless. It can be set anywhere – Rome, Athens, Birmingham – but the quality of the perception is what lifts it beyond the ordinary.

The press’ responsibility here is ridiculously important and divisive. Increasingly, their reporting is to do with the celebrity, the new and the sensation rather than the important, the significant and the nuanced. That applies to reviews as well as profiles of new artists etc. They’re always looking for what they suggest are radical profiles of artists but it doesn’t strike me as being radical, it strikes me as being chic. The celebrity thing absolutely pervades the way the world of theatre is written about and dramatised in the papers. We don’t have nuanced debate any more.

That said, there’s such a pressure to get audiences in and we’re in such a vulnerable place financially I’m not surprised that marketing and PR companies are used in the way they are being used. There’s a greater and greater reliance on trying to use any avenue to get audiences in. But I think its also the responsibility of a venue to encourage a more considered debate within the media. How we do that, I don’t know, but it needs to come from the top down.

Pigeon-holing, for example, is still an enormous issue and there are a lot of misconceptions about things like Asian theatre. I think that there’s an idea that there is an “Asian theatre”, that there’s a particular form that companies like Tamasha and Tara Arts engage in, and I don’t think they do. They just make theatre. The subject matter might change, the nature of the stories might be to do with experiences had by Asians, but I don’t think even that should be a brief of theirs. The only importance of them being identified in that way is to sort of say, well that is the profile of the people making the work, that is not the profile of the work but it says something about the historical, the cultural, the political background that the artists have been informed by.

This what theatre does for me more effectively and more uniquely than any other art form: it puts ideas and argument at the centre of the entertainment experience, and that needs to be celebrated and encouraged. Most people who work in theatre have a complex sense of otherness. There’s not a lot of money in this profession and people tend to persist with it because they have to. They need to ask questions and continue to interrogate things. It’s ironic that ultimately I think if we are only celebrating difference for the sake of difference, it’s not just reductive, it’s also going against what a form like theatre can do; which is to demonstrate the human parallels that transcend time, borders, race and age. Those are the sorts of things in a play that make you vibrate in sympathy with the other, as it were.

In conversation with Naima Khan

Snookered runs at Bush Theatre from 28th February – 24th March 2012

If you’d like to suggest an artist or get in contact about the On Progress series, email theatres@spoonfed.co.uk