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| Vol. 18, No. 36 | July 8, 1999 |
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| Vol. 18, No. 36 | July 8, 1999 |
For Lois Potter, Ned B. Allen Professor of English, teaching and research in Renaissance and Shakespearean literature have gone hand in hand with several years as a theatre critic in Great Britain.
This spring, she gave a talk in Seaford on "Theatregoer As Critic" as a fundraising event for the Henlopen Theatre Project, whose members hope to open a theatre in southern Delaware next summer, catering to audiences in the Lewes-Rehoboth area. The object of the talk was both to encourage enthusiasm for theatregoing and to show how becoming effective theatre critics enables audiences to get more pleasure from the experience.
She advised them, for instance, to think about what effects they liked most and how these were achieved, and to try-although it's difficult-to become aware of the distinct contributions of the actors versus those of the director. Rather than being hypercritical, she urged them to try to understand what the actors and director were trying to accomplish before deciding how well they succeeded.
"No one sets out to put on a bad production," she said.
Potter has been an ardent theatregoer for all of her adult life and has seen productions of Shakespeare's plays in Czech, Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Rumanian and Swedish. One memorable experience was a Chinese operatic version of Macbeth-very balletic and acrobatic with much chanting, she said.
She remembers another unforgettable performance in Prague shortly after the Velvet Revolution, when three plays by Vaclav Havel, the president of Czechoslovakia, were permitted on stage for the first time. The plays were performed in English by a visiting company, so the audience had to listen to translations through headphones, but it was an important event for them and very moving, she said.
As an Army brat living in Japan, Potter first became stagestruck when she was about 11 years old.
"My parents were going to take me to a production of Twelfth Night, and I came across a copy of the play at home and flipped it to the opening line, 'If music be the food of love, play on.' When we attended the performance, the play, of course, opened with this line, but the difference between reading it and hearing it spoken aloud-by a real human being!-was a turning point for me."
Army life next took the family to Arkansas-sort of a cultural desert at that time, she said, but she studied Julius Caesar in school. "I discovered that when I read the lines, I heard them aloud in my mind, and they came alive," she recalled.
Paris was the family's next assignment, and Potter became immersed in learning the language and in French drama. She was thrilled to attend a performance of her favorite play at the time, Cyrano de Bergerac and was able to follow along with her beginning French because she already knew the play in English. After graduating from the American high school in Paris, she spent another year in the Cours de Civilisation Française (a cultural and language program) at the Sorbonne before going to college at Bryn Mawr.
She wrote rough translations of French plays for her parents so they could enjoy and understand performances, and the culmination of these efforts was a translation, just for fun, of Molière's Le Misanthrope in rhymed verse.
Potter reviewed plays and other performances for the Bryn Mawr student newspaper, but that was put on hold while she worked for her doctorate at Cambridge University, researching and writing about the fop in literature from the 1500s to 1730.
After two years teaching at the University of Aberdeen, she became a lecturer at the University of Leicester, and being a theatre critic became her avocation.
She started out writing reviews and broadcasting them on the local BBC radio station, where she became a regular feature. "I had only a few minutes on the air, and the reviews had to be entertaining and catchy, so I used a lot of puns and one-liners like 'The can-can girls could-could' or 'His performance nearly stopped the show, and I wish it had,' " she said.
She also put out theatre broadsheets to give people more information about dramatic productions that were playing in Leiscester. She caught the attention of the London Times Literary Supplement and during the '80s was a regular reviewer for them of productions in London, Stratford and elsewhere.
Although she has done little reviewing since she returned to the United States and joined the UD faculty in 1991, Potter covered a Washington, D.C., production of Othello--in modern dress in an army setting and starring Patrick Stewart-for the Times Literary Supplement in 1998.
She has the highest praise for the UD Professional Theatre Training Program (PTTP) productions and wrote a review of their 1992 production of The Tempest, "A Brave New Tempest," for the Shakespeare Quarterly.
During her career, Potter has been a prolific writer and editor in her field, beginning with A Preface to Milton in 1971, revised in 1986.
She has served as editor of The Revels History of Drama in English and the Arden Shakespeare edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1997. This year, she edited and contributed to Playing Robin Hood: The Legend as Performance in Five Centuries, published by the University of Delaware Press. She is currently working on a stage history of Othello and a critical biography of Shakespeare.
As a theatregoer, Potter has come full circle. She recently took her nieces to see the PTTP production of Twelfth Night to introduce them to the magic of Shakespeare and live drama. 
-Sue Moncure
