What is reviewing for and why do we listen?

This doesn't refer to any review on this site. I have not named the play or the production as it is still running. Theatre reviewing is subjective everyone knows that. What you have to hope is that the reviewer is sympathetic with the style and understands the story. With work that has been done before that’s fine because the reviewer will presumably come with some pre knowledge of what he or she is about to see and at least the feeling that they are sympathetic to the piece. Now to present cases. You have a new play, it’s never been performed before and you’ve managed to get it on stage. You sit down on the opening night and watch the play with the audience and then wait with bated breath for the review/s. As this is a small scale show the reviews don’t come out the next day so you have a few performances to wait. Eventually the review comes out. Well, apparently the only good thing about the show is the performance of one of the three cast members. The script is compared in derisory terms with a bad TV day time soap. The other two performances are considered to be sub-standard and the direction (which you did) is panned. Even the fade in and fade out times of the sound are criticised. The first reaction is pain. You’ve got a lot invested in this. In this particular case four years of work on the script. It’s not even as though the script has not been seen by other eyes. It has gone through a long dramaturgy process and over the time the script has been tightened and smoothed out. The rehearsal process also resulted in rewrites as the cast helped make the story flow and the characters come to life. At one of the readings a very influential and knowledgeable person was very complimentary. You can’t complain. You put it out there and the reviewer has every right to dislike it. None the less there is a sense of bitterness. Obviously the reviewer did not understand the work. But that can only be your fault as well because you are the writer and the director. Feelings of anger also run through you. What right does this person have to criticise your work? Well, every right they‘re a critic who you invited. Then you think of your cast. They trusted you enough to do your play and you’ve let them down so you have to decide what to say to them. It’s hard as you now are thinking that you’ve made a huge mistake putting the play on and have hung your cast out to dry. The thing that really rankles is that it’s hard to make sense of the review given the audience reaction. OK so there wasn’t a standing ovation and cries of “author, author”, but none the less the reaction was positive and uplifting. A number of people were very complimentary about the play as they left and almost unheard of two audience members rang the following day to compliment the script and performances. Should a reviewer recognise and acknowledge audience reaction? So you start to think all sorts of uncharitable thoughts. Was there an agenda in the review, after all everyone else seemed to enjoy it? That way however lies madness. The final comment about the review is that it is not constructive in any way. It amounts to “I don’t like it”, which is not really helpful at all. Is it helpful to a potential audience? Well no one who reads that review will bother to go and see the play, they will just assume that it is awful and leave it at that. May be that means that people who might well have enjoyed it will not go. Is it helpful to the author putting a new play on stage? No, not at all. Should it be? Well yes it should. And there lies the nub of the discussion, I clearly have a different view of the role of the reviewer than the person who reviewed my show. Does it encourage me to keep trying? No, it actually encourages me to quit and that is a pity. Without people writing and producing new plays there will be no tried and trusted plays for others to perform.