Look closely at the title page of the copy of Marvin Rosenberg's The Masks of King Lear (1972) held in the library of the National University of Singapore, and you will discover that this classic work of Shakespeare criticism has received its own appraisal. A pencilled note in the bottom left corner reads:

Cute or pompous? Maybe both – but telling either way. In this brief exhortation we are reminded of the dual temporality of judgement: the sentiment comes thick, fast. It is impulsive and immediate, and overrides propriety – for instance, that rule about not defacing library books. But the expression is routine. Addressed to future ‘anyones’, our anonymous scribbler speaks in the language of Everyman. Paradoxically, ‘if you only read/visit/buy one X, make it this one’ is a very common phrase.

Thus are Rosenberg's allegedly priceless insights melted down into the base coinage of dust-jacket and playbill puffery. Not that Rosenberg's writings are themselves so very unique. There is a grandeur – indeed, a pomposity – to his language that reminds us how much both his sentiments and his expressions are indebted to the primary object of his criticism. The Masks of King Lear is, itself, one more mask of King Lear.

Such circulations of language and affect form the common currency of criticism. The object inheres in the analysis, even as the analysis reproduces other analyses of other objects. In the run of things, this is unremarkable, proceeding from production through reception, interpretation and evaluation across media and discursive modes, pacing out the time and notching off the place of judgement. However, from my perspective as a performer in The King Lear Project, a defining feature of the work was the way in which it effectively short-circuited this progression. In so doing, it posed a distinctive challenge to its reviewers, forcing them to show their evaluative hand in ways that revealed more about the process of judgement than they may otherwise have intended.

This is because the central – if somewhat quixotic – thrust of the trilogy was to use the substantial resources made available by an international festival co-commission to stage three ‘classic’ works of Shakespeare criticism, so testing their claims for the theatre against their own theatrical realization (and perhaps vice versa). In totality, the seven-hour performance tracked its way chronologically – if selectively – through the play, beginning with the first scene, and ending with the last. These stagings and restagings were interspersed with digressions in which the actors and designers, a director figure and her assistant, and a producer figure (played by me, seated in the audience for the first two shows), spoke lines lifted verbatim from the source essays and a number of other critical works.

In short, the theatrical process was at once expanded to encompass everything from the early stages of production to its most refined modes of reception, and telescoped, such that the highly wrought language and lofty judgements of literary criticism followed hard on roughly blocked and middlingly performed scenes from the play, and ad libs by the actors. I suspect that it was this particular combination of elements and effects that lay behind the sizeable critical response that the trilogy received, and in what follows I shall reflect on some patterns that emerge across the reviews, which appeared in newspapers and websites from Belgium, the UK, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and India.

On a procedural note, I would say that my methodology is largely one of systematic bloody-mindedness. While in other critical contexts one might usefully differentiate the reviews by medium or country of origin, or those that were positive and those that were negative, what interests me here is the degree of consensus amongst them, in terms both of what judgements were made, and of how they were arrived at. Taken as a whole, I recognize in the reviews an articulation of what I, as a performer, understood to be going on in the show: that it was a challenging work about power, performance and control. In contrast with my own experience, however, many reviewers derived these insights negatively, which might be paraphrased as: ‘it could have been a challenging work about power, performance and control: what a shame it wasn't’. Now, if a diversity of critical responses expresses a uniformity of opinion, it would be fair to conclude that the judgements are sound, and, as a performer in the work under discussion, I am perhaps uniquely unqualified to argue otherwise. But I will. In my view, the reviews were informed, insightful, well-written – and wrong. In fact, even where the reviewers were right, it was for the wrong reasons.

The main reason for this is that the most striking shared characteristic of the reviews is misrecognition: a general tendency to denounce as inadvertent failings things the performance was doing deliberately, and to opine about the greater insights it could have generated had the artists only been as perspicacious as the reviewers believed themselves to be. Take, for instance, responses to my role, as the performance's ‘in-house’ critic. ‘Dry to the point of dessication’,Footnote ¹ I gave my comments ‘in convulated [sic] language’,Footnote ² and delivered my ‘texbook lines’ with ‘such cock-sure pretentiousness you wanted to duct-tape his mouth’.Footnote ³ My interactions with the director were ‘pompous and exasperating’,Footnote ⁴ ‘increasingly contrived’,Footnote ⁵ and ‘stiff’,Footnote ⁶ and showed that Ho and Borgia ‘desperately need a better writer for dialogue’.Footnote ⁷

I could not agree more, because that is what I thought I was doing and being. Yet the reviewers allowed themselves to believe I was unaware of this, apparently on the assumption that I was trying – and failing – for some other tone or mode of presentation. The fact is that in The Lear Project, judgement itself was a trap, and I was the bait. Speaking written texts that are ordinarily the fruits of extensive reflection, I set myself up as an irritant; a smart-arse, streets ahead of an audience who could only be expected dimly to perceive their own understandings of the performance at that moment. Yet in deeming this disjunction a weakness, the reviewers showed a striking lack of self-awareness. I was, after all, making critical judgements, bludgeoning audience members with pre-emptive interpretations, and setting up a challenge for the real critics that they largely failed to meet. For in the rush to judgement, they overlooked the effects of theatrical failings that I thought the performance paraded loud and clear: it was didactic and tedious, embarrassing, dull and uneven; the audience was confused; it was too rigorously and stiflingly scripted, and poorly paced.

In my understanding, these unprepossessing characteristics – all identified in the reviews – combined with moments of intense focus and beauty to create an unhurried theatrical epic whose primary appeal lay in the rhythms it established across scenes, and between shows. Dover Cliff – The Conditions of Representation, for instance, worked grindingly through a series of iterations of the key scenes, with each new version failing appreciably to improve the last. Moment by moment, it was hard to watch – it was flat, flawed, failing, flailing. But over the course of the two hours, there were incremental changes whose very slowness granted the performance what I would describe as coherence and rigour. There was a gradual winnowing away of stage materials and business, until finally the actors themselves were removed from the stage, and in Brussels the doors at the back of the theatre were flung open. The reviewers were much relieved at this: ‘it saves its most wonderful moment for last’;Footnote ⁸ ‘Fortunately, Ho and Borgia managed to salvage the play by the end’;Footnote ⁹ ‘However, the evening was saved by a beautiful ending’;Footnote ¹⁰ but in their failure to recognize the reliance of this ending on the earlier difficulties, these reviewers hint at the pervasiveness not only of judgement, but of prescription.

Perhaps it was because the bard was at stake, but even normally sanguine reviewers decried what I thought were the trilogy's self-evident theatrical failings. ‘Spontaneity’ was sorely missed by many reviewers, and the script was generally held to be too contrived. This led to a number of contradictory observations. Accusations of didacticism did not stop the reviewers themselves from prescribing solutions: ‘there are aspects that can be further distilled and repackaged – the result, perhaps, would be tighter, more engaging, and even magical’;Footnote ¹¹ ‘I think the show would have been stronger if Ho and Borgia had ended here’;Footnote ¹² ‘Ho and Borgia did not entirely know how to boil this wealth of material down into a play’;Footnote ¹³ ‘They have moved from research to concept to stage too quickly. It hasn't been adequately followed through’;Footnote ¹⁴ ‘They should have done it properly, or not at all’.Footnote ¹⁵

This latter statement was made in reference to the refusal of the actors in The Lear Universe to engage in unscripted interactions with the audience. Despite their apparent concern for the audience's well-being, however, many reviewers saw nothing wrong with speaking on the audience's behalf, in order to underscore a failing. For example, the performance was ‘not unlike an overly long academic lecture – resulting in a tired and confused audience that eventually ceased to care where the whole thing was going’;Footnote ¹⁶ ‘the interpretations only belong to those on-stage and behind the scenes, and not at all by us, whom the production excludes’;Footnote ¹⁷ Rae's citations of Rosenberg left ‘no lasting impression on the audience's experience of Lear's entrance’;Footnote ¹⁸Dover Cliff had the effect of ‘experientially estranging the hapless audience’;Footnote ¹⁹ ‘it grew on you, and the audience felt like they were part of a big joke that grew funnier in retrospect’.Footnote ²⁰

These are unsubstantiated – and unsubstantiatable – statements, but the fact that so many reviewers had so little compunction about making them hints at the expansive nature of the show, where what might be described as an audience consciousness was integral to its unfolding. I have never before had an experience like the one I did in The Lear Universe, where it was clear both to audience members and to performers that there was no easy way out of the repetitive structure we were committed to. In the actual post-show discussion, one respondent suggested that this deliberately alienated the audience, but this would be to presume that we had substantially more control over proceedings than we felt we did. In my understanding, the performance established a situation that encompassed actors and audience members equally, in order to stage and explore circulations of power, knowledge and judgment within the assemblage of theatre as a whole.

Another audience member was perhaps a little closer to the mark when she stated after the performance that she had nothing left to do, because we had done ‘all the thinking’ for her. What she failed to recognize, at least at that moment, was that her observation was itself a new thought, and potentially the starting point of a challenging and productive line of enquiry. This, I think, was the trilogy's central provocation: to place all the paraphernalia of the theatrical event onstage by vacuuming out the pauses for thought. This would leave the audience member unencumbered by the usual repertoire of responses, and free to develop some different ones. In Singapore, in particular, there is a powerful political charge to this, since the idea of an agency produced through spectacle, but distributed throughout the social body, is arguably an apt model of how the authoritarian city state is governed. One of the effects of the so-called social compact, by which citizens accede to reasonably high-level constraints on civil liberties and political freedoms in return for social stability and economic growth, is the pervasive sense, expressed in public fora and private conversations, of a limit on both what and how to think.

When I say the reviewers got it wrong, what I mean is that they were so entranced by the spectacle, and exercised by its theatrical dysfunction, that they were reduced to writing insightfully and perceptively about how the King Lear Project prevented insight and foreclosed perception. Interestingly, the review that came closest to breaking out of this pattern, by Ng Yi-Sheng for the Singapore theatre website The Flying Inkpot, manifested a telling contradiction. Describing the trilogy as ‘a major work of national anti-theatre’, Ng's language runs closest to that of the performance itself, recalling the incorporation of the object into the analysis I mention above: ‘What the two [Ho and Borgia] have done is equal in pride, if not in quality, to the greatness of the Lear mythos itself. Their failures were human, their successes heroic, and their courage to even attempt this divinely mad.’ But the cost of such empathy seems almost too much to bear: ‘The truth is, I myself really enjoyed this show. How can I explain – not defend, but merely explain – my perverse opinion?’; ‘The artists were putting forth a new vision of theatre: not as a genre of entertainment, but as a punishing form of collective therapy, a shared experience of enlightening trauma’; ‘It was torture, and yes I managed to love the torture.’Footnote ²¹

Duct tape his mouth; love the torture: again, the object makes its presence felt, this time in the images and fantasies of violence it stages. It is too glib to say that there is a violence inherent in judgement, but there is a powerful sense in which judgement cannot know itself, and where the judge is unaware of this they can be left cruelly exposed. A final characteristic of many of the reviews is an intense animus towards academic writing and thinking. It reminds us that there is an element of stupidity to all judgement, but the harsher verdict must be the one cast upon the academics amongst us. In withdrawing from criticism in favour of ‘critique’ we have failed in our public duty, and ceded the ground to these amateurs. Scholars: unduct your conduct.