How to Review a Fringe Show When You Have 45 Minutes to Write

The lights come up, the applause fades, and somewhere in the building a press officer is checking a clock. You have forty-five minutes to file. Not forty-five minutes to think about it, or to sleep on it, or to draft three openings and pick the best — forty-five minutes before the review goes live and the company reads it backstage on a phone with a dying battery.

This is the ordinary condition of fringe reviewing, and it is not a crisis. It is a craft problem with a craft solution. The reviewers who file clean copy at speed are not faster typists or deeper thinkers than everyone else; they have simply learned to do the analytical work in the auditorium, while the show is still happening, so that the writing is mostly transcription and judgement rather than recall and panic. Here is how that works.

Take notes that survive the deadline

Notes taken in the dark are the raw material of the whole review, and most rushed reviews fail here rather than at the keyboard. A page of scribble that reads "great energy, second half slow, good acting" is worthless forty minutes later, because it describes a feeling rather than a show.

Write in the dark in short, concrete fragments that carry evidence. Not "strong performance" but "hands shaking during the phone call — held the silence three seconds too long, worked". Not "design is nice" but "white cyclorama, single chair, two hanging bulbs — cheap and beautiful". If you cannot write a fragment that would make sense to a stranger, you probably have not yet seen the thing you are praising.

A shorthand that fits a notepad

Develop a personal code and stick to it. Mine, roughly, looks like this: a plus or minus in the margin for each scene or segment, an asterisk for anything quotable or repeatable, a circled number for staging ideas I want to describe, and a squiggle for moments where the audience reacted in a way the show did not expect. That last one is often the most useful note in the book — laughter in the wrong place, or silence where a laugh was clearly built for.

Two practical rules. First, write the time — even a rough mark every ten minutes — because "the second half drags" is a claim you can only make if you know where the second half starts. Second, note what actually happened in the final thirty seconds before the curtain call. Endings are where rushed reviews become vague, and vagueness about an ending is the fastest way to look like you left early.

Decide what the show is trying to do before you decide whether it works

Halfway through, ask yourself one question and write the answer down: what is this show trying to be? A clown turn, a verbatim documentary, a mood piece, a sketch hour with a loose through-line. You do not have to like the ambition. You do have to name it, because a review that judges a cabaret by the standards of a well-made play is not a harsh review, it is a confused one.

This single line of notes saves enormous time later. Once you have written "aims to be a lo-fi gig theatre piece about grief", the structure of your verdict is already half-built: did the gig-theatre framing carry the grief, or did the songs keep interrupting it? Notice how much faster that is than starting from "what did I think?"

Choose evidence, not adjectives

Under deadline, adjectives are the enemy. "Electric", "uneven", "committed" and "promising" cost nothing to type and tell the reader almost nothing. Every judgement you make needs one specific thing behind it: a moment, a choice, a visible cost or a visible ease.

Three pieces of evidence will carry a short review. Not eight. Choose the three that are most vivid and most representative — one about performance, one about staging or writing, one about the shape of the evening. Then check them against each other. If all three pieces of evidence point the same way, your verdict is easy. If two point one way and one points the other, that tension is the review, and it is usually the most interesting sentence you will write.

• Ask of each note: could a reader who wasn't there picture this? If not, cut it.
• Prefer the visible: a costume change done in full view, a mic that fed back, an actor genuinely listening. These are checkable.
• Keep one moment you can describe in a single sentence — it will become your opening or your closing, and you will be grateful.
• Drop anything you cannot date or place to a point in the running order. Vague memory produces vague praise.

Build the review in four moves

With notes in hand, do not start at the top and hope. Write in this order and the piece assembles itself.

1. The verdict, in one sentence. Write it first, badly, in plain words. "A scrappy, generous clown show that runs out of ideas at fifty minutes." You will rewrite it later; for now it is the spine.
2. The evidence. Two or three short paragraphs, each anchored to a specific moment, each doing one job. Describe, then judge. Never judge without describing.
3. The context. One or two sentences on what the company is attempting, or where the show sits — a first outing, a scratch version, a transfer. Keep this factual and brief. Deadlines punish speculation.
4. The verdict again, properly. Now that the evidence exists, sharpen the sentence. Say who should see it and what they should expect, without pretending the whole fringe shares your taste.

Length discipline matters more than elegance here. A four-hundred-word review with three solid pieces of evidence reads as authoritative. A nine-hundred-word review padded with plot summary reads as a shrug.

Watch for the three deadline traps

Plot summary. The single most common filler. One sentence of what happens is enough; the reader wants your judgement, not a synopsis they can get from the listing. Unearned generosity. Kindness is a virtue in reviewing, but only when it is specific — say what worked and why, not that everyone tried hard. Unearned cruelty. The clever put-down is the easiest sentence to write at speed and the one you will regret. If you cannot support it with a described moment, delete it.

Write the final paragraph last, then leave

The closing lines of a fringe review do more work than any other part, and they are usually written in the last four minutes when the brain is tired. Give them a full five minutes instead. The closing paragraph should do one thing: tell the reader what to do with the evening. See it, see it if you like the form, see it when it has been reworked, skip it and see the other thing in the same slot. Be clear. Be fair. Be brief.

Then file, and try to leave the building within ten minutes of doing so. A review written at the venue, while the show is still in your body, is almost always better than one written at home after a bus ride and a cup of tea. The notes you took in the dark are not a lesser version of thinking; they are thinking, done early. Trust them, pick three pieces of evidence, and say what you actually saw.

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