Stressful, to begin with. Like standing on a table to deliver a birthday speech, slightly drunk – you know it’s kind of wrong, but you also kind of have to. And sometimes you do have to. There are only so many reviewers in Cambridge. Some drop out. Someone must fill their shoes. Editor? Yes. Yes you. There’s no-one else.

So there you are, then, seated in the audience. Second row? Third? Does it matter? You’re scribbling. Conspicuous. Sometimes in the interval people stare at you, and when you look up they turn quickly away.

Then there’s the self-questioning. She’s good, you think. Really good. Really good? Are you just saying that? Really good considering?

Or else: that familiar sinking feeling. You’ve made a terrible mistake. He’s bad. Oh god he’s awful. He looks exactly like that when—

All of this is inadmissible, of course. You can’t judge people based on what you already know about them. Then again, it might occur to you, isn’t that precisely what we do with the actors we see twice? With actors in film? With Philip Seymour Hoffman, with Meryl Streep, with Daniel Day Lewis?

I don’t really have any answers to this. I haven’t reviewed any close friends. One person in a recent production I reviewed I knew slightly, from my college; another I had talked to twice in my life. A third, who I praised in Speaking in Tongues, succeeded me as a co-editor of Emma’s weekly, Roar. Not exceptionally dangerous territory so far. I hope. What if I’m wrong?

Some foreknowledge is, of course, inevitable. Cambridge is small. (The Maypole is even smaller). And yet Cambridge theatre is also roomy enough to contain its own minor celebrities. Alex MacKeith – heard of him? Or Robbie Aird? How do we circumnavigate these reputations? It’s not merely that the dream of objective valuation is just that (a dream) – that’s a banality. That we come loaded with our preconceptions – rife with them, like diseased animals infested with flies – is equally trite. The problem extends deeper yet.

The truth is that reviews are pretty much bungled from the moment they are born. They are absurdly selective: I write more words during a performance than I publish in a review. The usual checklist (plot, set, actors, tone) barely covers anything, and leaves hardly any space. Like a skipping stone, reviews skim the surface of their subject briefly, at one or two points, and then they sink. They leave barely a ripple.

Sink into what, though? Irrelevance? The dusty web archives? I don’t know. The best way to think about reviewing is to consider it inescapably provisional, abjectly so. We write not because we must but because someone must, and it might as well be us. It’s bad to review people you know, but it may be worse not to review them at all. And hence the status quo.