Guides
How to review theatre and dance accurately
A method for reviewing live theatre and dance: build the performance record for your night, watch in layers, credit each collaborator, describe movement, and report access.
What to take away
- Review the night you saw. Record the date, the cast sheet, any understudy or replacement and your seat before you write.
- Credit each collaborator for the work the programme credits them with. Do not give the director every visible choice by default.
- Describe movement in verbs, weight, direction and level. Emotion words come after, labelled as interpretation.
- A cast list for a run does not tell you who danced on your night. A company can list a premiere cast while a work plays for many more performances.
- In Great Britain, the Equality Act 2010 requires venues that provide services to take reasonable steps on auxiliary aids. A reviewer's notes on access are observations and not a ruling on compliance.
Build the performance record
Live performance happens once. Your notes are the record of that Tuesday, that cast, that seat.
Write down these items before the house lights drop:
- Title, source text, adapter or translator, and the company and producer.
- Director, choreographer, composer, designers, dramaturg and stage management, as printed in the programme.
- Venue, city, date, start time, running time and interval.
- The cast sheet or slip for the night, any understudy or swing, and the pre-show announcement.
- Your seat or position. Keep the ticket and the programme.
For promenade, durational or site-specific work, also note where you walked, stood or could not see. A partial view is a legitimate basis for a review if the piece says so.
The V&A's Theatre and Performance collection holds company archives, designs, recordings and ephemera, which is why your own paper record matters: it is the same kind of material a later researcher will want. Archive records tell you about earlier versions and production labour. They cannot reconstruct what happened on your night.
A worked example: Woolf Works
The Royal Ballet's Woolf Works is a useful test of the record, because the credits are layered. Wayne McGregor's production page lists the 95-minute work as premiering at the Royal Opera House on 11 May 2015, with these credits:
Role / Credited to
- Concept, direction and choreography
- Wayne McGregor
- Music
- Max Richter
- Set design
- Ciguë, We Not I and Wayne McGregor
- Lighting design
- Lucy Carter
- Costume design
- Moritz Junge
- Film design
- Ravi Deepres
- Dramaturg
- Uzma Hameed
- Make-up design
- Kabuki
The Royal Opera House's own collections record describes it as a ballet in three movements, "I Now, I Then" (from Mrs Dalloway), "Becomings" (from Orlando) and "Tuesday" (from The Waves), and lists 18 performances of the 2015 production.
What this teaches a reviewer:
- Credit by craft.The set has three credited parties and the film has its own designer. A sentence that gives "the staging" to the choreographer erases them.
- Know the source and its limits.The collections record names the three novels. McGregor's page adds that the work also draws on Woolf's letters, essays and diaries, so "an adaptation of three novels" is incomplete.
- Do not use the original cast as your cast.McGregor's page lists fifteen original cast names for a three-part work. Neither page says who danced which movement on which of the 18 nights. For your night you need the cast sheet, or confirmation from the press office.
- Name the movement you are reviewing.Reviewing a triptych from one movement, or after arriving late, is a partial view. Say so.
Watch in layers, then describe
Watch the whole event before you break it into departments. Then work through body and voice, space, time, design, text and score, and the relation to the audience.
Layer / Record
- Body and voice
- Weight, rhythm, gesture, breath, stillness
- Space
- Distance, level, pathway, entrances, audience placement
- Time
- Pace, repetition, interruption, transition
- Design
- Set, costume, light, projection, sound
- Text and score
- Language, silence, music, cuts
- Audience
- Address, participation, house rules, response
Editorial suggestion: describe before you interpret. "The scene turned tense" lands harder when the reader knows the performers stopped answering, the side light narrowed and a floor pattern kept repeating after the speech ended.
For dance, use verbs: fold, press, suspend, drag, pivot, rebound. Add weight, speed, direction and level. Use the programme or choreographer's own vocabulary for named techniques, and say so when you cannot identify a step instead of inventing a name. The Library of Congress's dance research guide points to reference works, special collections, scores and recordings if you need history or a lineage. Research can inform an interpretation, but it does not replace observing the event in front of you.
The recurring errors and their fixes
Editorial suggestion: these are the errors that most often undermine a review of live work, with a fix for each.
| Error | Fix |
|---|---|
| Naming the usual cast | Check the slip, the lobby notice and the announcement. Review the performer who was on, and do not treat replacement status as a flaw. |
| The director did everything | Build a credit sheet from the programme and name collaborators where their work appears. If authorship is unclear, describe the effect and leave authorship open. |
| Movement becomes emotion words | Replace "powerful" or "fluid" with what the body did, then label the reading as interpretation. |
| One night becomes the run | Name the date. A missed cue is a claim about that performance unless you have evidence of a pattern. |
| A rehearsal is reviewed as a production | Say what you saw and at what stage. Call it a preview or process report, or attend a finished performance. |
| Access reduced to wheelchair entry | Report the routes, seating, sight lines, captions, interpretation and description you checked, with dates. |
| Applause treated as a verdict | Describe the response by location and moment. It documents a room, not unanimous opinion. |
| An archive photograph stands for the whole show | Mark reconstruction as inference. A programme records announced credits, not execution. |
Do not guess private information from appearance. Name identity when it is relevant and supported, then analyse the artistic work.
Report access as experience
Treat access as part of the staging. Caption placement changes sight lines. Audio description interprets visual action. Check these before you go: the entrance and route, seating and sight lines, toilets, captions or interpretation, audio description and touch tours, content notes, and the venue's assistance policy.
Two UK organisations show what to look for. Stagetext is a deaf-led charity promoting text-based access, including captioned theatre performances. VocalEyes is a charity whose main work is audio description for blind and visually impaired people, at theatres, museums, galleries and heritage sites.
On the law, section 20 of the Equality Act 2010 sets a duty to make reasonable adjustments. One of its three requirements covers auxiliary aids, which includes auxiliary services, where a disabled person would otherwise be at a substantial disadvantage. Which part of the Act applies depends on the kind of provider. Cite the venue's published access statement and say if what you found differs. Do not state that a venue is "compliant". That is a legal conclusion, and a reviewer's visit cannot establish it.
State what you used, what staff confirmed and what you did not test. Draft the access paragraph soon after the performance, while the detail is clear.
Interview, verify and correct
An interview is an account, not approval of the review. Give a responsible party time to answer a serious factual allegation. Where a cast change rests on medical or personnel detail, report the confirmed public fact and stop.
Before filing, check names, pronouns, roles, character names, quoted text, music credits, date, running time and cast changes against the programme and the company's replies. Publicity does not overwrite what you saw. The NUJ code of conduct asks journalists to keep information accurate and fair, to separate fact from opinion, and to correct harmful inaccuracies.
Correct a wrong performer, credit, quotation or date on the page. A later cast change or revised staging is an update when your review recorded its own night accurately.
For general ethics across arts desks, see the guide to arts criticism and cultural reporting. If the story is about money rather than the stage, the costs of putting on a London show and the rules for touring between the UK and EU after Brexit cover the business side.
