At 150 years old, Bulgarian theatre is at a point of struggling for existence in some aspects, and still, miracles occur. Directors, through their productions, transport audiences outside themselves, with sometimes stunning results. Polina Slavcheva examines the current status of theatre and theatre criticism in this country and abroad.

On theatre criticism, its unsuspected merits and the good that transpires when the lot gets together.

God gave people Ten Commandments, and theatre critics gave themselves Eleven. That probably says enough of the ungodliness of the trade. Or, hold on: the 11th Commandment advises critics to never write anything that they cannot say to their subjects' faces, and comes from president of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC) Ian Herbert, who was in Sofia in early summer 2006 to meet with Culture Minister Stefan Danailov. Herbert borrowed the wise phrase from acclaimed British critic for The Times, Irving Wardle. When put into practice, Commandment 11 may produce astonishing results, Herbert says: "On several occasions I've told a director to whom I've been rude: It's a great pleasure to meet you, but I have to say that I hated your last production. And several times the director has said: Yes, it was awful!"

Polite as Herbert is, he is also British, so you are probably unimpressed. But the need for Commandment 11 is sinister, especially when it comes to musicals, which appear to be a special case in the UK. Critics have been so unkind to certain musicals (Always, Leonardo, Napoleon, The Fields of Ambrosia), as to have slammed them "stone dead", as publisher of the R Cubed newsletter, Ian Senior, put it. The newsletter is a special example of critic exorcism that chief theatre critic for The Evening Standard Nicholas de Jongh has called "a prickly comment sheet". R Cubed stands for A Review of Rotten Review(er)s and appears to have been partly inspired by Senior's love of musicals, partly by the IATC's standards, and partly by London's West End critics themselves - the Cretinue (as in cretin).

"A lot of the theatre critics are not good at judging musicals," Herbert says to The Sofia Echo. "They expect to know the tunes as soon as they come out of the show. They are forgetting that when they we were young they were exposed to music like that of Rodgers and Hammerstein a lot before they went to see the show. Even Andrew Lloyd Weber's shows, Jesus Christ Super Star, they started out as record albums. People heard the music and they went and it was much easier. This is a very arrogant thing to say, but I've said it often enough."

So, by know you know that Herbert is a gallant critic who has inspired a Cretinue-slaying newsletter that, apart from "doing unto critics as they do unto others", as it proclaims, popularises morals among the Cretics' immoral.

The rest of the moralising business is legally taken care of by the IATC, which authored the Eleven Commandments and is turning 50 this year. Seoul will host the celebrations, along with talks on how theatre is expanding to create new "species", whose names cannot be captured easily by existing definitions. And since it is the business of critics to capture them anyway, the hardship of the task probably explains why the lot (some 2000 of them, coming from 50 countries), when coming together often "worry about how difficult it is to be a critic, and generally complain", Herbert says. Their last congress in Italy even discussed whether criticism was dead and whether there was any need for criticism any more (under the dark title: The End of Criticism?). And, Herbert says: "You would not be surprised to know that we found out that there was a need for criticism; we are gonna go on".

One of the stops for their next congresses will be Sofia, in 2008. The topic of that meeting is yet unknown, but we know that there will be a showcase of Bulgarian theatre and that Danailov has already Ok'd the meeting.

So, how does one go about to become a critic? In Great Britain, criticism is a craft, Kalina Stefanova says in her essay Like a Wine-Writer in Bordeaux: Reflections from Paradise. And, paradoxically, one cannot go about studying it in any school, even if the UK is the country with the best theatre, the best theatre criticism, and the best education in the world, and even if it was there that the profession of a theatre critic received its star status, Stefanova says. So, what one goes about doing in the UK is see a lot of shows. "It was when I'd seen maybe 2000 productions that I said: `Oh, by the way, I would like to say something'," Herbert says. So, he said something in an introductory article on the first couple of pages of The Theatre Record (a collection of reviews of productions in and out of London), which he had been publishing for a couple of years. And he is still saying the something now, some 25 years later. Although after handing the magazine to former Financial Times critic Ian Shuttleworth in 2004, he has been writing more about his travels than about theatre.

His theatre love started at an early age - his parents went to see many plays and were also amateur actors, so he often found himself sitting in the back of the theatre "while mother and father performed". In his teens, he became an inveterate by going to a lot of shows. "And `my teens' - we are talking serious history now. This is half a century ago!" he says.

So, it is not a surprise that while studying classic philology and philosophy at Cambridge, Herbert chose to pursue directing as well. But his ambition left him as he watched two of his fellow students act so well, that he decided that professional theatre was not in his league, Stefanova writes in her book. And he went into publishing. The Theatre Review and the book Who's Who in Theatre, which he was publishing earlier, were a continuation of the theatre passion.

The quantity of theatre one sees and the speed of writing reviews is partly what differentiates the Western from the Eastern critic, he says: "The Eastern critic is able to look at the production in depth. In Russian critical training you would go to the rehearsals, watch the rehearsal, then see the opening night, and go one or three times more during the run of the play as well. And a year later you write your criticism," he says. "In London you don't have time to do all that with 20 shows opening every week. You jump from one theatre to the other time and time again and see very varied theatre; and, along with that, a lot of commercial theatre that many academic critics detest."

A lot of theatre taken like that is good for the adrenalin, but "in tiny doses", Herbert says.

But, can one ever get rid of the love of theatre, then? "Have you ever heard of an actor retire?" Herbert says. "When they are like 90, they say: Oh, I got to stop. But that's when they can't remember their words. Instead of retire, I left the magazine."

Commandment 10 for theatre critics says that one should do so when they feel they have mastered the job, because they should never actually know how to do it. "That's a great idea - one of the commandments. It's when you can write (your critic's piece) before you enter theatre that you should quit. But I stopped partly because I'd done it for 25 years," Herbert says.

"The first skill (to being a long-time good critic) is to respect the world that you're mocking," he says. And know that "it's so much easier to write an un-fine review than a fine one because it is funnier, wakes up your reader, and the essence of comedy usually is that somebody is being and suffering enormously. But it's a temptation you really have to be careful about".

Another thing is to ask yourself why a performance is bad before sitting down to criticise it. A theatre review should also answer the questions: What is this production trying to do? How is it trying to do it? And did it succeed? If you can't get those questions answered, then you can write your review, he says. One shouldn't necessarily be too literary or deep as well, Herbert says, or at least not always. "For you to be very, very clever is a signal for them to stop reading. Sometimes being shallow is useful, too, if you are writing for people who are not particularly clever."

When asked about competition between the London and the New York stage, he says: "Yes, but it is not too fierce because they feed on each other - a London success is a success in NY and a NY success is a success in London. We are getting New Yorkers come to London now again. One small advantage we still have is that we are not interested in non-musical theatre as a commercial product, so you would look for new plays and new writing in London rather than NY, although there is very good new writing in Chicago and Philadelphia as well - outside the big centre. You don't take risks in NY because there's too much money involved. And there's something of that in London as well. Our producers used to out what they were directing in West End stages. But this is much more of a problem now - there's too much money to lose. So, it's not a perfect world, but it's not a bad world".And the IATC gives a good change to observe it in symposiums, bi-annual seminars for baby critics, and world congresses every two years that produce "some very interesting papers on the scene in different countries", Herbert says. The IATC website says theatre should "contribute to reciprocal awareness and understanding between cultures" in a very interesting way.

"It is a good club to be in."