comedy feature

Luke Wright Reviews

Luke Wright, solo performance poet and Aisle16 star, speaks to his fellow fringe types (and er, himself) about why bad reviews hurt, and how best to deal with them.

I received my first ever review in Edinburgh, 2002. My mates and I were painfully sipping orange juice one morning and I was flicking through The Scotsman when I almost choked on my Nurofen: there we were on page 15! And it was a good one; Clare Smith had “loved it”. Suddenly we were no longer a rabble of hung-over students from Norwich: we were “five young blades in open revolt against consumerism and celebrity culture.” Which was a far better thing to be.

We still struggled for audiences, and never got invited to the cool parties, but in print we were on the same level as the big name comedians. In those few column inches I found a kind of respite from the rip-off venues and bored punters. In order to actually get up and perform on stage I was cultivating a massive ego, and even though the majority of the critics wrote in tired clichés, it was those lovely, affirming clichés, rather than the applause, that became the food for that ego’s insatiable appetite.

I became dependent, every year relying on the Edinburgh flattery to get me through the grind of another year. Until, in 2007 I got some pretty mediocre reviews. They weren’t bad, just a little lukewarm. By then I was onto my second solo show and outside of the festival things were going really well for me; I had a book coming out and I’d just done my first solo tour of the UK. It should have been water off a duck’s back – I still got plenty of tour bookings and work carried on as normal - but I couldn’t’ shake the disappointment of that year’s festival.

This year I’m back with a new solo show about the last two years and the weird state of mind those reviews propelled me into. I pored over them, re-reading between the lines, and whilst to a certain extent I could rationalise it (a review is, after all, just one person’s opinion), it really bothered me. In an effort to prevent myself sinking into the same review-based slough of despond this year, I set out to talk to other solo performers, hoping that they might have some advice to help put it all in perspective. Surely they don’t respond to their reviews with the same gimpish hand wringing as me, memorising the worst lines and fretfully imagining ripostes late into the night? Do they care? Do they even read them?

After a long period of not reading any reviews, veteran Edinburgh comic Dan Antopolski now reads them, but says “I’ve cultivated a studied indifference to it. I think I’m old enough and ugly enough to not be particularly dismayed by a bad review.”

Manly words indeed, but is it the same for the less old and less ugly? Fringe newbie Elvis McGonagall has experienced the harsh words of a critic before, as poet-in-residence on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live: “Rachel Cooke in The New Statesman said “And there’s a poet, someone you’ve never heard of, whose every verse sounds like it was written by Les Dawson on the back of a fag packet.” His response? “Well I was annoyed at first, but then I thought Les Dawson is a comic genius so I’ll just take it as a back-handed compliment.”

An admirable and mature way of dealing with it. So, no Edinburgh nerves then? “No, I’m shitting it. I’m nervous someone might dissect the act in forensic terms.”

Fellow Fringe virgin Gerry Howell is also thinking about critics’ responses. Like me he can see how critics can play a part in the response to a successful show. “A good review will validate it and will make me feel a lot better about the rest of the run,” he says apprehensively, before adding in a more determined tone, “but I need an audience and it will help me to get an audience”.

That is, after all the primary function of a review: to let prospective audience members know if they will enjoy a show. The likes of Antopolski and fellow veteran Stewart Lee see that more than most. “The main thing about critics for me as a 41-year-old man with a child and no ego and ambition left,” says Lee with a wry smile, “is, will it harm me financially? A good review helps you to sell out and a bad review won’t”.

But are reviews just part of the business of selling tickets? Richard Herring, Lee’s former double act partner, performing his 25th show on the Fringe this year, sees things differently. “I’ve been doing comedy for 20 years so I know more about comedy and what I’m doing than a lot of the actual reviewers,” he says, “but there are certain ones that you listen to and like.”

He goes onto to mention Steve Bennett from Chortle who is “out every night watching comedy.” Bennett also appears in the list of five or so critics that Lee mentions as being those whose feedback he is genuinely interested in. In fact the more I talk to Lee the more it becomes apparent that the need to know what people, not just reviewers, make of your work never goes away. And nor, too, does the fear that they might, well, hate it. When I ask him about his recent BBC2 series he tells me that he went away for the entire period it was being broadcast; “I didn’t want to read about it and I knew I’d spend 2 hours a day looking on the internet, that was my big worry”, he admits.

As Herring points out, with comedy “everyone’s a critic,” because they either laugh or don’t laugh, but it’s much easier to shrug off a bad gig than a bad review. So why does the written word haunt us in a way a meagre response at a gig doesn’t? “It’s probably just some deep-seated inadequacies,” laughs Elvis McGonagall, “and it seems to be common among people who perform, that kind of constant self-doubt.”

So how do we defeat our demons? “The only real way to deal with it psychologically as time goes by,” he says philosophically “is to ignore them all, the good ones and the bad ones.”

It seems that in order to get over our bad reviews, we have to first get over our good ones. The larger the ego swells the more it can be hurt. Pride before a fall? I guess it is all about clichés in the end.


The Petty Conerns Of Luke Wright’ is on at Underbelly each day at 6.00pm

Stewart Lee: If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One’ is on at The Stand at 7.45pm

Richard Herring - Hitler Moustache’ is on at Underbelly at 8.40pm

Dan Antopolski - Silent But Deadly’ is on at Pleasance Dome at 9.20pm

Elvis McGonagall: One Man And His Doggerel’ is on at Gilded Balloon Teviot at 5.45pm

Gerry Howell’s Incubation Hour’ is on at Underbelly at 5.15pm

published: Aug-2009

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