The lights came up. You have four pages of notes and no plot to summarise: a woman dragging a heavy coat across gravel, a low bass note that made the floorboards hum, two performers standing still just long enough to become unbearable. The review is due by morning. Where do you start?
Devised and experimental work doesn't defeat the conventional review so much as slip past it. Judging it by what happened is like describing a piece of music by listing the notes in order. The criteria are still there — precision, structure, intention, effect — but they sit in different places, and a reviewer who only knows how to ask "what was the story?" will come away with nothing to say. What follows is a practical set of questions, in roughly the order you should ask them.
Every performance makes an offer. A naturalistic play says: sit still, watch these people, care about their choices. A durational installation might say: wander, stay as long as you like, notice your own impatience. Before you judge whether a piece worked, work out what it was asking of you, and whether it asked clearly.
Two questions are worth writing at the top of the page: What did this piece want from me? and What did I want from it? Keep them apart. Most unfair reviews of experimental work come from answering the second question and pretending it was the first.
Learn to tell refusal from failure. A show that withholds narrative on purpose may be doing something rigorous; a show that simply loses its thread is not the same thing, even if both leave you frustrated. The way to distinguish them is consistency. A refusal is held across the whole evening; a failure appears in patches and usually takes the performers by surprise.
In devised work, movement often carries the argument that text would carry elsewhere. Watch for the difference between movement that is precise and movement that is merely energetic. Energy is easy. Precision is a decision. Ask whether a phrase could be repeated exactly tomorrow night — if it couldn't, you may be watching improvisation dressed as composition, which is fine only when the improvisation is genuinely alive.
A useful exercise: pick one performer and follow only them for five minutes. You will often see the structure of the piece more clearly from its edge than from its centre.
Sound in experimental theatre is rarely decoration. It does structural work. It marks the act break, moves the location, changes the emotional register, or tells you where to put your attention. Note whether the design amplifies the room or argues with it: a microphone placed near the ventilation grille says something different from a score played at full volume over it.
Ask where the sound puts you. Inside the scene, close to a performer's mouth, or outside it, observing? Volume is an instrument, and so is silence, which is never free. A long silence costs the audience something, and the piece should spend it well.
One habit pays off. Close your eyes for a minute — it is allowed — and listen. Then write down the three sounds you remember. Those are almost always the ones doing the work, and often the ones you would have forgotten to mention.
Promenade staging, in-the-round, cabaret tables, a bench in a stairwell, one spectator at a time. Where the audience is placed, and how much it can choose, is a compositional decision rather than a logistics problem. So ask what the arrangement allowed that a proscenium would not, and whether the piece actually used that permission.
Be alert to sightlines. If you missed something, decide whether you were meant to. Deliberate peripheral loss, where the crowd shifts and you accept that you will only catch a fragment, can be honest and even moving. A blocked view because nobody checked the corner is a different matter, and worth saying so.
Notice the moment you become aware of your own body: a stiff neck, a knee, the shuffle of a stranger behind you. In immersive work that awareness is frequently the actual subject. Report it as material, not as complaint.
Non-linear work still has architecture. Look for a spine: a recurring image, a rule the performers obey, a question the evening keeps circling. Then test the repetitions. When something returns, has it returned changed? A motif repeated identically is a tic; a motif returning into a new context is composition.
Try the cut test. Could ten minutes be removed without loss? If yes, the piece is longer than its argument. And if the ending merely stops rather than completes, say so plainly. An ending is a decision, even when it looks like an accident.
With collage, judge adjacency. The question is not what each fragment means on its own but what the collision between them produces. Two unrelated images placed side by side should generate a third thing. If they don't, you have a programme, not a piece.
Condense your notes against these before you write a single sentence of judgement.
Lead with the experience, not a synopsis. Describe one moment in concrete detail — the coat, the gravel, the bass note under the floor — because specificity is what makes experimental work reviewable at all. Then state what the piece seemed to be attempting, and whether its means matched the attempt.
Keep a column of nouns and verbs rather than adjectives. "Pretentious" and "brave" are the two laziest verdicts available, and both are shortcuts past the work of saying what happened. If you were bored, say precisely when and why. A critic who can locate boredom is more useful than one who simply reports it.
Write the description before the judgement, on the page as well as in your head. The description will tell you what you actually think. Then give the reader enough of the room — the temperature, the distance, the length of the evening — that they can decide for themselves whether to go. That is the service. The verdict is theirs to reach.
Photo: photoGraph / Pexels
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