The problem with Fringe reviews

Fringe performers both rely and dread reviews. A boffo review can boost houses to sellouts, and a bad one can have almost as bad an effect in the opposite direction.

The WinnipegFringeFestivalpresents a special challenge to the mediabecause 181 productions hit town for 12 days. That's a lot of reviewing, and the pool of knowledgeable theatre people who can also write a competent review is small.

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• CBC reviews the 2015 Winnipeg Fringe Festival

This year the CBC team had some insightful reviewers, among them Bradley Sawatzky, Shawna Dempsey, Al Rae, Michelle Palansky Kelly Stifora, and regular reviewer Joff Schmidt.

Unfortunately, they handicapped this team with the misguided policy of trying to cover the whole festival in the first weekend.

I have complained before about this policy. It puts unfair pressure on the reviewers, who have to see a large number of plays in a short time, and then make snap judgements.

This is a huge challenge to a seasoned theatre journalist, but because of having to hire an army of reviewers to cover almost 200 productions, we sometimes get otherwise intelligent people who do not have the tools to comment critically on theatre.

The reviewof my show falls into this category. I knew I was in trouble in when in the second paragraph the reviewer described the hospital bed as "dank."

Dank means uncomfortably moist, and I do not know how the reviewer would know that without lying in the bed or having a character describe it as such. Neither happened.

More issues

OK, so the reviewer has some vocabulary issues. The reviewer then complains that the play is "a list of life events following their chronological order."

The first scene takes place in 1955, when Bill Cliffe awakes from a nightmare. Then we have a flashback to 1939, when he is handcuffed in a police car. Next we are back to 1955, when Cliffe is telling the nurse about his experience as a child labourer, which leads to a flashback to his first job interview in approximately 1903and his apprenticeship opportunity in 1905. We return to 1955, and then there's another flashback to the police car in 1939. That's just the first seven or eight minutes. Chronological? Hm-m-m. Maybe she doesn't know what "chronological" means, either.

The fault lies not with the individual but with a system that instead of bringing out the best in people, forces them into a situation where it is almost impossible to succeed.- Kevin Longfield

She then says, "Much of Cliffe's story is set during Winnipeg's golden age," which raises some other issues. Winnipeg's golden age ended with the building of the Panama Canal in 1914. We therefore have to wonder if the reviewer knows what "much" means, since "much" means in great quantity.

Bill does not move to Winnipeg until well into the script, where he uses three sentences to describe life in the boom town. The next mention of life in Winnipeg is after the Great War. This is well after the boom years, and he spends less than a year in Winnipeg before heading to rural Manitoba, where they spend almost all of the next 20 years.

Even if you make adubious decision to include the post-war sojourn in Winnipeg as part of the boom years, we have only two short paragraphs covering this period; at most, one minute out of a one-hour show. I am not sure that less than one per cent of the script qualifies as a great quantity, but this assertion leads to one of the most bizarre comments in the review.

She complains that the narrative mentions only Ukrainian and British immigrants, and moans about the lack of other ethnicities,including indigenous peoples. Well, the main character is Britishand the nurse is Ukrainian. He is describing his life to her while giving her the respect of acknowledging her background. He is telling her HIS story, not Winnipeg's or Manitoba's.

But it gets worse. In a review that criticizes my play for "forgetting our collective history," she says, "He describes Shoal Lake as vacant land, untouched by 'man.'" I never said that. I never referred to Shoal Lake, except when Bill tells the nurse that the aqueduct brings water from Shoal Lake to Winnipeg. No events or memories take place in Shoal Lake, but she accuses me of "a dangerous rewriting of history" for not mentioning the indigenous people living in a place Bill never describes.

Bill does describe one memory of waking up in his cabin in the wilderness and describes the beauty of the Canadian Shield, and understandably, given that it is daybreak in the wilderness, there are no people of any ethnicity in view.He describes the scene as "looking the way God had created it," not "untouched by 'man.'"

All that said, I do not blame the reviewer for her inaccuracies and misstatements. Just as in Bill Cliffe's life, the fault lies not with the individual but with a system that instead of bringing out the best in people, forces them into a situation where it is almost impossible to succeed.

Kevin Longfield covered the Manitoba scene for a national theatre magazine for five years in the 1990s. The 2015 WinnipegFringe TheatreFestivalwas his debut as a solo performer.