Tim Byrne is a critic, arts journalist and bookseller at Avenue Bookstore. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian, Australian Book Review and Time Out, and appears on ABC radio to talk theatre with Alice Zaslavsky and books with Trevor Chappell. He has been a judge of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (VPLA) and moderates author and artist interviews at writers’ festivals around Victoria.
How would you describe what you do to a layperson not in the arts?
I’d say I watch a hell of a lot of performing arts, from dance and theatre to opera and circus, and then try to write honestly and accurately about the experience of watching, listening and paying attention. I’m trying to contextualise and explain the performing arts to anyone who may be interested.
How did you get your start as a theatre critic?
I was an actor/director many years ago, as well as a life-long theatre and performing arts lover, who then became a writer. I was asked to help out at Time Out Melbourne reviewing shows (unpaid, initially), and then gradually built up a body of work. I’d never write free of charge now, but I recommend it only for a short while to establish a voice and reputation.
What are some of the challenges of the role?
The biggest challenge is getting to know and love performers, writers, directors and artists who I then have to critique in public. It’s hard to criticise people you respect enormously. It’s also quite exhausting going to the theatre so much (sometimes up to five nights a week!) and trying to hold down another job at the same time. Not that I’d complain about that.
What’s an average week like?
An average week starts with a desperate check of all the things I have to see, people I have to email or interview, double bookings I have to manage, people I have to disappoint. Then I’ll do my day job, rush to a show, stay up sometimes till three in the morning writing a review. I’ll sleep a bit and wake up to rewrite/finish a review that I’ll file that morning. There’ll sometimes be some discussion with my editors about certain lines, details and questions of fact, and then we’ll publish. Then I’ll either have the night off or do it all over again.
If you were hiring for this job, what qualities would you look for in a candidate?
I think the key quality I’d look for is an overwhelming curiosity about the world – not just about theatre in all its forms (I have absolutely no patience for people who have highly specialised interests, who only like “post-dramatic experimental theatre”, for example, or “fin-de-siecle Italian opera”), but about art and music and literature and poetry and architecture and history… (you get my point).
Read: So you want my arts job: Playwright
The performing arts are vitalised by the entire world, and theatre writers need an interest in that world, in all points of view and the multitude of experience. Also, you need to be able to write, to have a strong voice and understand grammar and style, structure and form. This last point seems lost on the vast majority of “online theatre blogs” who have the most perfunctory interest in the English language.
What’s the most common preconception about being a theatre critic?
The most common misconception is that critics “don’t like” the art form they criticise, that “being mean” is somehow damaging to the medium. I think the opposite is true: a gushing, uncritical response to a show displays a lack of respect for the art, for what the art can and should be doing. Arts criticism is an attempt to take the arts seriously, to grapple with and analyse the whole sector, to draw comparisons, to make connections, to elucidate and contextualise. That’s serious work, not flippancy and gossip – which I think is a lazy way to dismiss us.
What advice would you give to a newbie?
My advice to emerging critics used to be about structure, about building an argument for your take on a work. I still think this is important, but now I think there’s something more important, one idea that should guide everything you write: precision. Always be precise. When something is bad, a performance or piece of writing, design or concept, it’s not enough to say it was bad. You have to say precisely why it was bad. Every single word should hold weight, should convey exactly what you experienced. I recently ranted on socials about the word evocative. Never say something was evocative! Evocative of what? That’s it: be precise.
