Something Daniel Kitson said on the night of my birthday has really stuck with me – he joked about how arbitrary the Advertiser reviews appeared to be with their star-ratings. That, in turn, has made me consider the legitimacy of my own ratings – with the result that I reckon I’m going to drop them entirely.
Now, I know what the four of you who actually read these posts are thinking – “Oh Noes!! How will I be able to determine what shows I’d go to if I actually went to any at all without Pete’s ace scores?”
Well, let’s just look at a little background info… I treat my scores as an event score, simply because the question “is Show A better than Show B?” is such an arbitrary question. How can you really look at two performances and think “4:48 Psychosis is better than Sam Simmons“? It’s absurd to even attempt to compare the two. So I’ve always taken a different approach – I’ve always scored the event, the totality of the experience. And I’ve always asked myself the question “which event would I most like to re-live?”
Of course, that gets me into trouble. For example, Under Milk Wood is a cracking bit of theatre that’s well worth seeing… but I wouldn’t like to see it again. Thus, my initial “10” has always caused me some consternation – it’s ace, you should see it, but I wouldn’t want to see it again.
So – I’m going to not score things anymore. I’m going to try and get the point across without numerical support. Which requires better writing. Which is bad, because my writing SUX. Ho, hum.