An episode for your weekend: Arifa Akbar
What's it like to review a play? We ask the top theatre critic at The Guardian
Our interview this week is with Arifa Akbar, the chief theatre critic at The Guardian, in England. Arifa has been a journalist for more than 20 years (you can read her work here). She’s the former literary editor at The Independent and has also written a memoir. Below is an excerpt from our conversation. Special thanks to former guest Aisha Sultan for connecting us with her cousin.
I know that some of the circumstances of your early life were arduous. Was there anything that happened early on, whether it be for you or in your family or your heritage, that foreshadowed a career as a theater critic?
Well, you're right. It wasn't an easy upbringing. My parents immigrated from Pakistan. They had very little. What I gained from them wasn't much in material terms, but it was immense in terms of the values and the ambition and the imagination that my childhood was infused with. My mother's side had a lot of businesspeople and teachers as well. Her mother had been a teacher and she had this great sense of ambition for her three children … We got a real sense of proving ourselves through her.
My father: His family had been landowners before the Indian partition, when they ended up on the other side of India, in Pakistan, as refugees, and a very difficult life for them.
He came here again to start over all over again with us. And what I got from him was a love of literature and imagination and he was a great storyteller and journalism, whether it's criticism, whether it's news stories, whether it's a feature, is about telling stories.
What's the first paragraph? How do you begin your story? If you share it with a friend, what's the most exciting bit or what's the hook that's going to drag them in? So those are the things I got from both sides of mother and father, and they served me in good stead.
What do you do when you get to a theatre to review a play?
Can I add the preamble of before I get there? Because there's this perception among some that the theatre critic's job starts on the arrival to theatre, but for me it doesn't.
Preparation for me has always been key, whether you're interviewing someone, whether you're being sent to the other side of the country on a news story, whether you're reviewing a show. So if I'm reviewing a show, if I'm reviewing a revival of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare, or if I'm reviewing a revival of Jerusalem, I don't just roll up to the theatre at 7pm, which is the time the press night starts.
I will revisit that play, either in text, where I'll have a read of it very quickly, or I'll watch an old production or, even if I'll have seen an old production, I'll try and get hold of an old production and watch that on YouTube, wherever I can. If it's a new play, I don't really read that text because I want to see it enacted.
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How do you take notes in the dark?
You sit there with a notebook and a pen, and you're sort of writing but still staring at the stage, and you're not really doing it. You can't see a thing. I'll get out, and I'll get home, and I'll have written it a slant, and there'll be some words where I think, what on earth was I writing. What was I thinking? But they are just triggers.
I'm quite intuitive, I do look through my notes. I'm quite a note taker. And even if I can't decipher some notes, I can decipher others. I take quotes down, and those quotes are important because I sometimes start a review with a quote, or with a character's words.
And, I've got shorthand. At the age of 25, I learned shorthand. It was one of the best things because you can get things down so fast. And it's actually easier to read back. I don't know whether you do it, but I'm an old fashioned, I've been trained the old-fashioned way. Shorthand, you can do a hundred words a minute. You can really write very fast.
Do you have advice for college students reviewing the theatre done by their fellow students?
If you're reviewing somebody's work, you might know them, you may want to be encouraging, you may be a really nice, polite person, and you may not want to offend.
But what I would suggest is drawing inward … and being at that kind of honesty and not thinking about ‘What will Blah think of me if I don't like this’ or if it's a cheesy musical, you actually really love it, then, ‘Oh God, is this the kind of thing that I should like?’ You have to do away with all those inner conversations.
Honesty always pays off in criticism. It's about personal taste. As long as you back your argument, as long as you're not sneering or spiteful, nine times out of 10, a writer and people who are involved in theatre will respect a negative review if it's coming from an earnest place, if it's said without nastiness.
I would say to a student, really believe in your reaction to something, to a book, or a play, or whatever. Believe in it. If you're bored, think, why was I bored? Or if you yawned or something and found yourself sleepy, think back about what was it about it that didn't work?
Have faith in your true response as the right response for you. And have the courage to say what you actually felt.
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