As a reluctant finalist, I’ve had to spend a lot of time piecing together CV-ready soundbites and thinking about ‘transferable skills’. But although I’d like to say to say I’m now a fully-trained apprentice of the ‘real world’, there’s one crucial skill I haven’t mastered: multi-tasking. In spite of the pressure to let different parts of university life overlap, I’ve subconsciously kept the ‘doing’ and ‘reviewing’ parts of my theatre career separate.

From an early age, I’ve spent a lot of time ‘doing’ theatre. After acting in local theatre groups and writing one page of a pretentious and downright terrible Pirandello-esque play during A-Level Theatre Studies, I felt like a fully-fledged expert by the time I arrived in Cambridge. 
But encountering theatre here involves a lot of re-thinking. For one, you’ve got to get used to the fact that ‘amateur dramatics’ means a very different thing from zero-budget village hall productions. Secondly, you can’t do a double-take every time you see Lady Macbeth leaving a Law lecture or Figaro eating a cereal bar in the Arc Café – this sort of weird cross-contamination is just part of the Cambridge experience.

But there is still an inexplicable fault line running between performers and critics. From the view of an actor, eschewing an extra-theatrical social life for weeks in order to rehearse and braving the harsh exposure of the stage, a reviewer is the person who turns up on opening night with a beer and a notebook to offer a casual ‘yay’, ‘nay’ or ‘meh’ to their blood, sweat and tears. From the view of a critic, burning the midnight oil after a lateshow and fretting over the exact star rating, actors are ingrates who don’t fully appreciate their pivotal role in spreading the word. The truth, of course, is that they’re symbiotic roles. Nonetheless, we seem reluctant to mix the two.

There are some ways in which knowing the behind-the-scene dynamics is helpful for a critic: I find the experience of directing a friend’s first attempt at playwriting has given me a slight phobia of ‘new writing’ and a great respect for successful productions of it; I can trace a good (or bad) relationship between cast members from the dressing room to the stage; I know how much low-budget shows rely on the ingenuity of the production team. But it’s also possible that my empathy for the cast interferes with some unfettered criticism: am I more concerned with what the cast want to hear than what a potential audience wants to know?

Trying to discern what makes a good review, I came to conclusion that ‘impartiality’ was too much to hope for. Whether or not you join the Footlights, you will still see at least one familiar face at any two comedy gigs. Spend any time at the English Faculty and you’ll see Clytemnestra lounging in the foyer with last year’s pantomime dame (and you probably know their real names).  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s part of living in a medieval town which has been colonised by a twenty-first century university; where students make the theatre, the music, the comedy, the television, and the news. Like most pursuits in Cambridge, theatre is inextricably a community experience.

But this community of polymaths makes me wonder what gives critics any authority at all. Is anyone a ‘specialist’, or are we all just multi-tasking? Is a good review an erudite critique of the success of the Grotowskian ‘Poor Theatre’, the mise-en-scene? Are we either practitioners who write decent prose or writers who ‘know’ theatre? Possibly neither. In fact, the hardest and most appropriate thing you can do when reviewing a play is to stop being a critic (or an actor, or a director) and start being a member of the audience.

For most people who go to the theatre in Cambridge, an hour of sketches or a Shakespeare play marks one of the occasions in their week when they don’t have to multitask. When they see a devised piece, they are not, for instance, musing sadly on their unfinished Pirandello-esque tour de force. They are thinking about being entertained; edified; transported. Those experiences are the criteria for judgement, and critics should keep that in mind. Knowing what acting and directing is like can help you write for the cast, but it doesn’t help you write for the audience. That’s why I’d prefer to stay exclusively on the other side of the fourth wall this time around: I’m really no good at multi-tasking.