Hedda, garbled: Belvoir’s Hedda Gabler

The role of a reviewer, John McCallum has said (quoting Katherine Brisbane), is to articulate why a team of people have spent upwards of six months of their lives bringing this play (or this version of a play) to the stage, and communicate it to an audience. Additionally, the role of a reviewer is to comment on a production, on its strengths and weaknesses, to review a production in all its nuances. I write reviews because I find it the most effective way to record my thoughts about a production and because, as John McCallum so eloquently said in his Philip Parson’s speech in 2010, I’ve been “theatre-fucked” and I want to share the experience with others, encourage them to be “theatre-fucked” too. Favourable reviews are only written when a production deserves it (you can find a selection of them on this site) and they are always a challenge because you can’t say everything; your average review is the most common, but is no less easy or hard for being so – the bad things mustn’t outweigh the good, but the good things can soften the bad. Unfavourable reviews are perhaps the hardest to write because of the time investment that Brisbane-via-McCallum talked about, because I don’t believe that any production is ever truly ‘bad’.