收到保加利亞Dr. Kalina Stefanova寄來一份資料，2004年於St Petersburg舉行的一次劇評人會議所整理出的筆記。我認為很有趣也很有幫助，經Dr. Stefanova同意轉載。內容如下：
Please don’t repeat our mistakes but rather take note of them.
1. Be honest. If you don’t understand something, just say so: “This isn’t clear to me.”
2. This isn’t the same as revealing your ignorance: don’t say King Lear is a terrible play unless you’re pretty sure of your argument.
3. Preserve and develop the talent to recognise beauty. Sometimes it’s better to start a review with the good things before moving on to the bad.
4. When you see a bad performance, have the guts to say so. In the short-term you might lose friends, but in the long-term your honesty will gain you respect.
5. Leave your prejudices at the door. Just because you hated the company’s last five shows, doesn’t mean the sixth won’t be a work of genius.
6. Declare your biases. If you always dislike musicals or you always love Ray Cooney farces, it’s reasonable for the reader to know.
7. You are writing for your readers, not for the theatre profession and not for posterity. You must entertain, amuse, excite, inform and argue just as much as anyone working in the theatre. And you must do it on your own terms.
8. Get a life. Just because you spend all your time in theatres doesn’t mean your readers do. To be in their world, you must refer to real life. You should know about politics, literature, pop music, reality TV, soap operas, philosophy, art, technology, science, computer games, supermarkets, architecture . . . in short, everything.
9. Never marry an actor. If you can’t help it, do so temporarily to get some inner knowledge of the theatre.
10. There’s no recipe for criticism. You’ll never know how to do the job. The day you feel you’ve mastered it is the day you should quit.
Yours sincerely,
Anneli Saro (Estonia)
Geert Sels (Belgium)
Larisa Turea (Moldova)
Lawrence DeVine (USA)
Mark Fisher (Scotland, Britain)
Matt Radz (Quebec, Canada)
Nikolai Pesochinsky (Russia)
Spyros Payiatakis (Greece)
Zuzana Ulicianska (Slovakia)
Kalina Stefanova (Bulgaria) - monitor
沒有深奧的理論，卻包含前人豐富經驗，簡單實用。(很想知道誰跟演員結婚之後發生什麼事)
Thank you! Dear Kalina : )
