On 4 March 2020, the great and the good of the Music and Drama education worlds will gather at an exclusive London hotel for a star-spangled award ceremony celebrating the extraordinary talent, projects, organisations and products of this rich and diverse sector.
The Music & Drama Education Awards feature a number of categories for educational projects, but also reward individuals of all ages for exceptional work in these fields, and one of the awards for which I am particularly excited to be a judge is the Young Theatre Critic of the Year award.
Open to 16-24 year-olds from anywhere in the UK, this award will be given to a young person who shows extraordinary promise as a theatre critic. The simple application process to be considered for this award involves submitting a 350-word review of a theatre production of any kind, with the option to put forward a limited number of supporting materials.
Ahead of the launch of this process I had a chat with much-respected theatre critic Lyn Gardner, who writes regularly for both the Guardian and The Stage. I asked her how she had come to be a theatre critic and what about that journey might differ for young people today:
‘I was always a really keen theatregoer as a child and I was lucky enough to be supported in that by my parents – and then when I was at university I started doing some journalism and wrote for the student newspaper, including some reviews, and then after university I went and worked for a magazine called City Limits and started writing reviews in earnest.’
Gardner entered criticism at a time when it was a very small specialist field: ‘When I started, on the whole around 14 to 20 primarily white, middle class, Oxbridge educated men wrote about theatre, and to a large extent I would say that their views were then set in stone, or at least set in print. The thing that happens now is that anybody who is really interested in theatre can set up a blog and start responding to theatre and writing their own reviews – and I think that that is a far healthier situation because it means there's now a multitude of voices of all different ages and from all different backgrounds writing about theatre.’
And, Gardner remarks, ‘we talk a lot in theatre about the idea that the people making the work should reflect the audience, and I think similarly that the criticism we have should also reflect the demographic makeup of the audience.’
In this context, it is not only an exciting but also an important time for young people to pursue at least part of a career as a critic. So I asked Gardner if she had tips to offer those considering it: ‘You should review anything you see and wherever you see it,’ she says, ‘And the truth is that there are lots of people out there who are already reviewing those glossy West End productions but there will be far fewer people who will be reviewing the work that is taking place at their local theatre, and that would be a really broad range of work from participatory and community theatre right through to professional productions. I think that people may be surprised actually about how delighted any local theatre worth its salt would be in trying to support any young bloggers who want to write about their work.’
‘Actually,’ she goes on, ‘we need more local reviewers writing about local work – as a result of which we’d be able to chart, potentially over quite a long period of time, the health and state of theatre in a given vicinity.’
Like all other arts-based careers, it's a precarious existence and Gardner is keen to point that out to aspiring young critics: ‘I would be reluctant to suggest that it is in any way easy to make a living as an arts critic at a time when actually the mainstream media is absolutely being squeezed. But what I do think that it's really possible to do is to make a living out of it as part of a portfolio career – to have huge amounts of enjoyment, and actually be contributing to the wider theatre culture and ecology in a really significant way alongside a number of other things that you may do.’
So if you or young people you know would be interested in submitting a review for consideration, head to the website for the Music & Drama Education Awards, where you’ll find full instructions and a submission form. But hurry! The deadline for submissions is 4 November 2019.