Stellar coverage: 30 years on, how star ratings changed the Edinburgh festivals
It’s 30 years since the Scotsman introduced star ratings to the Edinburgh festivals. Andrew Eaton-Lewis considers their impact
In a Fringe queue this month I overheard some audience members discussing a show they’d seen. “I’d give it two stars,” said one. Their friend thought it was more of a three. They weren’t critics, they were just acknowledging that this is the shorthand we all now use to describe art. Artists themselves often obsess over star ratings, knowing that a four or five star review can be the making of their show, and anything less can make it invisible.
No wonder that star ratings shape a whole cultural conversation in Edinburgh. There are thousands of them, inescapable and everywhere: on billboards, banners, bus stops and bodies.
And it was the Scotsman that started it. Thirty years ago we became the first publication to use star ratings at the Edinburgh festivals. While it’s true that star ratings were used long before August 1996, passing concise judgement on everything from music to hotels and holidays, the world’s biggest arts festival is where they are brightest. Over the years, this has given a lot of power to the people who give out those stars.
It’s a responsibility the Scotsman takes very seriously. Having commissioned Edinburgh festivals reviews for this newspaper every year since 2002 (yes, I am ancient), I have spent more time than is probably healthy talking to critics about how to allocate stars. It’s a delicate task. Our critics - the majority of whom have been reviewing Fringe shows for decades now and have seen thousands of them - take no pleasure in giving something a one or two star review. However, the reality is that if you are going to bring a show to the world’s biggest arts festival, you are choosing to compete against some of the world’s best artists. If we award a four star review to anything that doesn’t stand out in that context, we’re doing a disservice to the shows that do. Any Scotsman critic will tell you that they are strongly discouraged to award a five star review unless they are absolutely sure the show merits it. If they do this more than twice in a week they will get a concerned phone call from me.
The flipside to this is that I’ve long made a point of encouraging our critics to find something positive to say, even in a one or two star review. As someone who has spent much of the past ten years developing, programming and making creative work myself, including producing three Edinburgh Fringe shows, I’m very aware of what it feels like to be on the other side. And so I ask writers to be as constructive as possible. Did a particular performance show promise? Was the music or the set design good despite everything else?
The 1-5 star rating system the Scotsman introduced to Edinburgh back in 1996 has been copied widely for an obvious reason: it’s simple to understand. A five star review is something rare and exceptional, a must see. A four star review is a show that does everything right, but you can probably still imagine seeing something that matches it elsewhere in the month. A three star review is a good, solid piece of work, a satisfying way to spend an hour, but perhaps not life-changing. A two star review possibly has a few good moments but doesn’t live up to your expectations. A one star review is a disappointment across the board. I could describe each rating slightly differently but it’s fair to say that the public has a general shared understanding of what each one means.
It stings, of course, when you don’t get the stars you want. I’ve noticed, over the years, that performers often react more angrily if you give them a three star review than if you give them one or two stars. A one or two star review can be dismissed, if you have a thick enough skin. A three star review is like being friend-zoned. Who wants merely to be liked, rather than loved?
My usual response is to point out that three star reviews in the Scotsman are often very positive, they are just written by reviewers who have been doing this long enough to understand the international standards they are measuring your work against. That doesn’t mean we think audiences should avoid a three star show. One of my favourite ever Fringe shows was one that got three star reviews across the board but was recommended to me by a friend who knew the kinds of things I loved. Neither should one or two star shows be dismissed. The Fringe is a testing ground for ideas (or is supposed to be). As an audience member you can sometimes learn more about creativity, and the world, from a show that doesn’t quite work. And for performers, the trial by fire of a one-star show can often to a four-star one. At last year’s Scotsman Fringe First awards, one of the winners used their speech to point out that their Edinburgh debut a few years before had led to... a one star review in the Scotsman.
It is, of course, an imperfect system. Personally, I’ve long been wary of shows that receive four or five stars across the board. Really, everybody loves it? To me, that suggests a show might be telling its audience something they want to hear rather than challenging them with something they’d prefer to ignore. Black Watch, the National Theatre of Scotland’s first mega-hit, always felt to me like an example of this, a show lavished with praise partly because it powerfully articulated what its audience already thought about the Iraq war. Personally I recommend seeking out shows that have a five star review and a one star review. If critics disagreed with each other so strongly, it suggests something more uncomfortable and subversive might be going on. And that’s always worth seeing.
The star system does have one big problem these days: inflation. With so many reviews across so many publications, a single four or five star review can feel less valuable than it once was, in marketing terms at least; instead it is often the number of them that makes you stand out. As an audience member faced with over 4000 shows (it was around 1200 when I started doing this job), which do you choose - the one with a couple of four star reviews or the one with a dozen? A poster with a single four of five star review now looks a bit lonely. Only one critic liked you?
My professional answer to that is that you should go by what the Scotsman says, since our critics have 1. been doing this longer than most and 2. see more shows each year than anybody else. But I appreciate that this is little comfort to someone given a one or two star review on these pages.
To those people I have two things to say. 1. I get it, I’ve been there, you’ll be ok and 2. take inspiration from the theatre company who, a few years ago, somehow managed to get a five star, a four star, a three star, a two star and a one star review in the same August, and decided to put all of them on a poster and challenge audiences to make up their own minds. That inspired decision has stuck in my memory longer than a lot of the shows we’ve given four star reviews.
Andrew Eaton-Lewis is Edinburgh festivals editor for the Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday. He also works year-round as a festival programmer and theatre producer.
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