These Our Critics
Sm,—The London dramatic critics are a fine body of men. But when they are seated in the stalls can they actually see the stage?
On Monday last week a play called When Did You Last See My Mother? opened at the Comedy Theatre. On that all the critics are agreed. Accord- ing to the Sunday Telegraph it shows 'a callous pre- datory homesexual setting out to seduce and destroy the mother of his best friend in revenge for his own failure as a Casanova.'
So far so good (or bad) except that this is not the play the man from the Observer saw. His version has roughly the same characters but 'It treats the love of two eighteen-year-old schoolboys, waiting to go up to Oxford. Ian and Jimmy rightly regard their homosexuality as a passing function of being sent to boarding-school, but when they try to switch to women—disastrously, in Ian's case, to Jimmy's mother-L-they realise they're hooked : they are in love.'
This in turn does not bear a lot of resemblance to what the Sunday Times sat through : 'It is not a play about homosexuality. It is a play about unhappiness. It is out of this unhappiness that the homosexuality of Jan, a young man just about to go up to Oxford, who seduces his friend's mother because she reminds him of her son, rises.'
As for your own excellent dramatic critic, he was present at none of these. He saw a 'play of un- exampled frankness in which at last public-schoolboy- Oedipus ups and makes love to his mother on stage.' Unexampled frankness indeed!
Not surprisingly, these various plays have widely differing endings. The Guardian's final curtain, which leaves the hero 'snapping on the television' is, I sup- pose, in the same general area as that the Daily Mail saw: 'We leave him alone with the tin of beans and the loneliness and the bitter flip farewell.' But the Daily Telegraph had a distinctly disturbing evening. Bad enough to encounter 'a school-leaver of eighteen who is apparently 'already experimenting with sex.' But then for the author to end the play 'by bringing down his final curtain on a pair of young homo- sexuals locked in an embrace' !
Now I suppose critics should not, on the whole, give every detail of the plot, but this is ridiculous. I believe that film critics are given careful synopses of the films they see by a thoughtful (and careful) management. Wouldn't it be a kindness to all of us to help out the heavy brigade in the same way?
PATRICK TIMBER 3 Malvern Terrace, London, Ni
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