Theatre Critique and Professional Practice: Engaging Artists and Audiences. Talking About Shows We Didn’t Connect With

Because the most important work for professional theatre practice often happens after the curtain call

I was in the theatre recently, and the show lost me around the twenty-minute mark — a scene change that killed the momentum and never recovered it. By the final curtain I was ready to write it off. But I was being lazy. Around me, audiences were talking excitedly. Colleagues were animated. Social media buzzed with praise. The work was clearly doing something, even if it hadn't done it for me.

I've been in that position more times than I can count. It's uncomfortable, and the temptation is always to trust your own cold response and leave it there. But a field that only talks about work it loves isn't really talking about work at all. Staying in the conversation when something leaves you cold — that's where the useful thinking tends to happen.

In development rooms, people argue. About structure, tone, character, rhythm — sometimes for weeks, sometimes badly, occasionally with real heat. When those arguments are handled well, they're generative. Writers get clearer about what they're doing. Directors learn to articulate instinct. Designers find solutions they wouldn't have reached alone. A lot of strong work comes from exactly that — not everyone being on the same page, but people staying in the room when they aren't.

The same is true in the wider field. When one practitioner says "I don't understand this choice" and another says "here's what I think they were reaching for," the work opens again. Not to be fixed, but to be looked at. That kind of exchange sharpens thinking in ways that quiet agreement never does. Theatre doesn't develop through consensus. It develops through friction — and through the willingness to stay engaged when something doesn't land.

We don't arrive at a show neutrally. We bring training, habit, and a particular kind of attention — one that clocks structure before story, rhythm before emotion, intention before impact. We spot risk quickly, and we spot the absence of it just as fast.

That doesn't make us better audience members. It makes us different ones.

The question isn't whether to set that knowledge aside — you can't — but whether you let it do useful work or let it get in the way. Judgment that arrives too quickly narrows rather than deepens. One way to counter that is to witness before you evaluate: let the work run on its own terms before measuring it against your preferences, or against the version you'd have made yourself. That's not suspending critique. It's sequencing it.

Theatre takes time. Meaning accumulates rather than announces itself, and the full shape of something often only becomes clear near the end. Leaving early is one thing. Publicly critiquing a work you didn't finish is another. Restraint in that situation isn't weakness — it's honesty about the limits of what you actually saw.

Our words carry weight in this industry, often more than we register — particularly in smaller companies and training contexts. I found this out when I heard, secondhand, that a colleague had disliked one of my shows. When I went back to them directly, they hadn't said that at all — they'd raised a question about one casting choice. Second-hand reporting is unreliable, and if you're the one passing it on, your credibility takes the hit when it turns out to be wrong.

Being generous about work you didn't connect with isn't about pretending to like it. It's about being precise: what was this work trying to do, where was it taking a risk, what was it testing? You can disagree with it without writing it off. You can critique it without judging the artist. That distinction matters.

That precision is harder to maintain when the work is popular and your response isn't. I've directed work that put this tension in sharp relief. Audiences came back. They stayed to talk, brought friends, filled post-show discussions. The work was landing — emotionally, communally, in the room.

Among colleagues, the response was cooler. One conversation I remember: audiences praised how clearly the central relationship tracked across the evening; a director colleague felt that clarity had come at the cost of formal ambition — that we'd opted for legibility over risk. Both were accurate. They were just looking at different things.

That gap never resolved into a verdict, and I'm glad it didn't. Professional discourse attends to form, lineage, context, innovation. Audiences register clarity, momentum, feeling, recognition. These aren't competing values — they're different lenses, and neither cancels the other out. The trouble starts when one is used to dismiss the other: when popular response gets written off as unsophisticated, or when professional disagreement shuts down rather than opens up the conversation. The work that stays in the culture tends to be the work that keeps inviting argument rather than foreclosing it.

The same logic holds when the work is a peer's, or a mentor's, or someone whose practice you've long admired. Pulling back is a natural reaction. The problem is when it stays private and hardens into dismissal.

Silence has its own costs. When practitioners consistently avoid engaging with work that challenges or bores them, it sends a signal — that disagreement is unsafe, that collegial relationships require full agreement. Early-career artists are watching how this is handled. The norms they absorb come less from what's said explicitly and more from what they observe.

Cynicism is easy to mistake for discernment — but they move in opposite directions. Discernment asks what the work is doing. Cynicism has already decided it doesn't need to find out. And when I'm honest about the times I've reached for a dismissive response, it's rarely because I've seen it all before. It's because staying with something that confuses or unsettles me is uncomfortable, and a quick verdict makes that discomfort go away. Dismissal isn't a sign of taste. It's a defence against uncertainty. When we refuse to engage with difficult work, we're not protecting our critical standards — we're protecting ourselves.

Staying engaged — even with work that frustrates you — is harder, and more worth doing. It forces you to say why something doesn't work, what risks it was or wasn't taking, where it succeeded in spite of itself. Practitioners who stay in that conversation after a difficult show tend to produce more interesting next work than those who don't. Dismissal is a habit, and it compounds.

Not connecting with a show doesn't make you a bad audience member or a disloyal colleague. Refusing to think carefully about it does.

Cold, puzzled, frustrated — those responses are worth something. Precise, honest disagreement isn't a problem for the field. It's part of what keeps it functioning. Without it, risk-taking becomes harder to justify and easier to quietly drop. Assumptions go unchallenged. The work narrows.

We sit in two places at once: inside the work, with knowledge of how it was made; and in the audience, where it either lands or it doesn't. Holding both without letting either one take over — that's the discipline. Not generosity in the soft sense, but in the rigorous one: staying curious, staying precise, keeping the work at the centre.

The show ends. The conversation doesn't have to.

A note from the author: the ideas, arguments, and experiences in this article are entirely my own — drawn from forty years of working in theatre, film, and actor training. I used AI tools during the writing process to assist with spelling, grammar, and the verification of facts. What it cannot do — and did not do — is think for me, feel for me, or replace the professional experience from which every observation in this article comes.