Critical condition
Lloyd Evans on the perils of being both playwright and critic
‘N o man sympathises with the sorrows of vanity.’ Dr Johnson was speaking of a poet who looked to his friends for solace after his verses had been savaged in the press. He got none. That’s the risk all artists take. I’ve been through this experience myself (and I’m about to submit to the ordeal once again), and though I found it hurtful and humiliating to have my work trashed in public, it also enriched my understanding of the theatre and assisted me as a professional critic.
In 2005 Toby Young and I collaborated on a sex farce, Who’s the Daddy?, which enjoyed a sell-out run on the London fringe and won a best new comedy award in a trade paper. The following year we wrote A Right Royal Farce, a light-hearted spoof set in Buckingham Palace. We knew it was a big risk to mount a second satirical comedy in the same theatre. The law of the newsroom states that success should be followed by failure and our new play needed to be only a teeny bit worse than our first for us to get a right royal hammering. And we did. The critics didn’t just skin us alive, they turned us into handbags. ‘The worst thing to hit London since the Blitz,’ said one of the kinder notices. A sofa-filler on Late Review called the play the most worthless human artefact the programme had ever considered. In one of the newspapers where stars are awarded, the reviewer called for a whole new scale of evaluation to be invented. Giving us ‘no stars’ was far too charitable. We deserved negative stars, death stars, black holes, imploding supernovae.
In my columns I’d vultured other people’s work plenty of times. Now I discovered how it felt. And it wasn’t nice. When Kingsley Amis said a poor review should put you off your breakfast but not your lunch he was dead right anatomically. It gets you in the stomach, the organ of comfort and regeneration. You feel queasy and frail, holed below the waterline. And you can’t turn to loved ones in your distress because, like Dr Johnson, they ascribe your sombre mood to a ruptured ego. Or they assume you’ve enamelled yourself like a tortoise with some magical armour that deflects the critical bullets with harmless pings. In any case, who wants to admit to being ‘tortured by bad reviews’? It’s like admitting to scrofula. But once it was over I found it oddly liberating. I no longer suffered pangs of guilt when attacking other playwrights’ work. I’d dished it out and now I could take it too. I’d been bloodied and that gave my criticism added legitimacy.
Working in the theatre had given me a fascinating insight into the minds of producers and directors and the misconceptions they entertain about the press. A lot of them just don’t get journalism. The writer–director Simon Gray, to take one example, talks in his memoirs of critics gathering at press night to agree on a unified response to his play. The Critics’ Circle, a conspiracy? He’s by no means alone in this bizarre belief but why on earth would critics collaborate? We’re in competition with each other, and the press barons we work for are mortal enemies. Of course critics meet and chat on press nights but they never reveal their opinions to colleagues. That would be professional suicide. The critic’s sole aim, believe it or not, is to give the most vivid and searching account of the play that he can. And the notion that we might be induced to adopt a preordained opinion is a fantasy. However, speaking as a playwright, I can well understand where the fantasy comes from. A writer faced with 20 reviews, all of which tell him his play stinks, is likely to console himself with a bit of Gothic paranoia. ‘They’re ganging up on me.’ But they’re not ganging up on him. The reason 20 noses went poo was that 20 noses sensed something rotten.
There’s no reason for this atmosphere of suspicion to exist between journalists and the theatre. A spot of cross-fertilisation would help. Newspapers should consider recruiting theatre critics from the theatre rather than from the newsroom. And actors and directors should receive some instruction in the mechanics of showbiz journalism. This might eradicate some of the more basic misunderstandings. During the previews of Who’s the Daddy? Toby and I had trouble with journalists sneaking into the theatre and writing stories about the play that were effectively reviews. Technically this breached the gentlemen’s agreement that precludes newspapers from reviewing plays before press night, but the subject matter, the Blunkett sex scandal, was so juicy that news editors couldn’t resist it. The cast were furious. And one of them came up with a brilliant ruse to stop the hacks in their tracks. ‘We’ll make an announcement before curtain-up asking all journalists to identify themselves and make their way quietly to the exit. Simple.’ Toby and I fell about laughing. The average hack, we had to explain, would sooner confess to being a Serb war criminal than publicly admit to being a journalist.
The most surprising discovery of all — and I’m treading warily here lest I talk myself out of a job — is that critics’ opinions count for much less than anyone realises. Perhaps for nothing. After A Right Royal Farce had been greeted by those ‘take me out and shoot me’ reviews, Toby and I were resigned to the inevitable. Empty houses. We felt obliged to demonstrate a bit of solidarity with the cast so we trudged along to the theatre one Tuesday night like a pair of lepers. We may even have carried a bell to warn the untainted of our approach. But there was no tumbleweed blowing through the auditorium, no graveyard chimes echoing in the wings. The house was two thirds full. An open-minded audience was prepared to let the show do its best or worst. And they laughed their heads off. The reviews? Either they hadn’t read them or they’d ignored them. The box office concurred. The show was a modest, if not a runaway, hit. And while rehearsing my forthcoming play I’ve been greatly comforted by the knowledge that the critics are far less influential than is generally believed. Grand Slam opens next Tuesday and I await the reviews in a state of Confucian serenity. Nothing will stop me enjoying my breakfast the following morning. I’m having yoghurt, toast and a bottle of brandy.
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