So, theres this artist, a writer. One you love and respect.

One you have history

with, someone who challenges, stretches and excites you. He has a play, you have
a theatre. You think the play is brilliant and that with work and love and care it
can be even more so. You think it makes important and uncomfortable claims:
about how we name and shape the world; about how the violent power of
language is casually tossed around; about how the forms and narratives that fill
our televisions and films and internet carry codified misogyny, homophobia and
racism so deeply that they are never even acknowledged; about how the sharp
edges of these words change the shapes of our thoughts and in changing our
thoughts change our actions and in changing our actions change ourselves.

So you make the thing, you commit the resources; you find other people, actors
and designers who feel it too. You are lucky enough to be in a position where you
can get some inspiring and hugely talented people to come and share their skill
and passion with you. Collectively you tease the thing out, hone it, shape it, give it
form. When it is ready you take it to the largest arts festival in the world and you
open it, you show it to the world. You are in the hugely privileged position of
being an established artist with resources and support behind you, so a lot of
critics come to your opening. Critics you respect, critics you know and trust,
whose opinions you read often alongside the cultural experiences you live
through. Critics you know to be invested, rigorous and experienced.

The reviews come out. This is always an odd moment of cognitive dissonance.
The experience and the private naming you have for what you have made never
matches, nor should it, the way it is seen and named. Sometimes reviews are
brilliant and you do not recognise the thing they describe, that type of cognitive
dissonance is easier to come to terms with. The feeling that someone loves a
piece of work in an unexpected way is not too hard on the ego. This is not one of
those times.

This time the reviews are bad. Very, very bad. The worst you have ever had. The
things you see in the play are not seen, the things you see in your actors
performances, in your designers conception, in your direction are not seen. In its
place something slight and facile and ill-conceived is described. It is day one of
the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and you have a very large and very public critical
disaster on your hands.

So then what? What do you do then?

Well, for starters the second person singular is no good to you. Pretending this is
happening to someone else is not going to help. Its me, Lorne Campbell, Artistic
Director of Northern Stage and Director of I Promise you Sex and Violence and I
am going to do this: I am going to live in the given circumstances, pretend
nothing, deny nothing but be exactly here. I ask this of actors obsessively, play
the given circumstances, be live, deny nothing, allow everything. I do not claim
the critics are wrong and I am right, but neither do I accept that they are right
and I am wrong. I have worked with a team of people I am inspired by and we
have made a piece of art of which I am proud. We will set about doing our jobs,
we will do what we would have done anyway, we will be as honest and as
present as we can, trust the decisions we made, and most importantly meet the
audiences who make themselves available to us with the very best we have.