No comfort for reviewers

Kenneth Hurren

That was a bad year that just happened — even for the concerns of this department. I have Often found it a comforting thing, moving into

another year, to look back over the one just disappearing into the maw of time, to savour again in memory the pleasures that were there

and perhaps to reassure myself for the future that the playhouse was not really in such terrible shape as in so many weeks it had seemed; but in 1975 the pleasures were pitifully few, and reassurance requires an act of faith that I can only just muster. It is the paucity of genuinely meritorious new Plays that depresses. Casting my votes in the annual poll of reviewers' opinions for the 'London Critics' Awards' — the results of which are published in the current issue of the magazine, Plays and Players — I could not bring Myself to nominate anything sufficiently superior for the 'Best New Play' category, and indeed there were only three items with which I could toy as possibilities: Otherwise Engaged, Alphabetical Order and Comedians. These were the plays that generally had the support of my fellow voters, and the first-named came out on top; but the fact that in previous recent years such works as Travesties, Lear, Wed of Suez, Equus, Absurd Person Singular and Habeas Corpus have not been considered good enough to top the poll is an indication of the lower standard to which we were asked to adjust ourselves in 1975. I can sustain my hopes in the

future only by remembering that such imma_ culate writers as Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer, Christopher Hampton and Alan Bennett submitted no new work during the year and may Well have superior pieces on the drawing

board, and that there are others — David Hare, Peter Nichols, John Osborne, Edward Bond and Alan Ayckbourn among them — any one of whom is liable to come up with something stunning, even if none did in 1975.

There are, by the way, some endearing eccentricities in the reviewers' poll. A couple of

votes in one of the categories went to a Performance that I should have thought would be generally regarded as the worst to be seen on a West End stage in a decade, and those

industrious reviewers who slog around the More obscure venues of the 'fringe' produced

some remarkable lists which would have me believe, for examples, that the best director of the year was Pip Simmons, the best designer Di

Seymour, the best musical The End of the World Show or possibly, Raindog. Well, if the irrepressible Harold Hobson can put up Jeeves in that last category, why not? It would be improper of me, however, to summarise my colleagues' votes and views so

lavishly as to discourage you from buying Plays and Players which, with some bravado and doubtless a touch of whimsical perversity,

Prefaces its awards feature with an article by Ronald Bryden, a former reviewer, who sabotages it by being singularly disparaging about his old mates.

BrYden is as distressed as any of us by the present woebegone state of the theatre, but his • diagnosis of its troubles is in one respect rather different. I am bound to warn those who recall his reviewing days on the Observer — when he developed a remarkable facility for shaking off all but the most conscientious readers by the end of his second paragraph — that his piece runs to about 3,000 words and that you'll have to plod through at least half of them before you

get to the backbiting. Much of his text has to do with the danger to the future of the theatre in a system of subsidisation that puts an undue emphasis on the classical repertoire — which he sees as "a National Treasure theatre" offering

"cultural totems and tourist souvenirs." I suspect he rather exaggerates this danger, but it is a valid point of view and the argument is familiar enough, except that he proceeds to link it to the entertaining proposition that the real villains responsible for the sorry condition of contemporary drama are the reviewers.

It is perhaps necessary to say here, for the benefit of those who may have been inattentive to Bryden's curriculum vitae, that he gave up reviewing some five years ago to become 'play adviser' to the Royal Shakespeare Company, in which capacity he has been closely associated with the production of a number of plays which were presumably staged on his advice and which may not have been reviewed, on the whole, quite as respectfully as he might have wished. It is clear that he found Most of the notices of them sloppy and uniformed, but he restrained himself from beefing and offers the impertinent excuse that he did not wish to antagonise the writers, thereby betraying that his opinion of their integrity is as low as it is of their professional ability. Now that he is leaving the RSC for another job in Canada, he lets fly.

The majority of the reviewers, according to Bryden (with what degree of self-reproach it is hard to say), got into the game in the late 'forties and :fifties because they saw it as "an opportunity to display education at the expense of the less educated," and have since had the dispiriting experience of seeing a newer wave of brains emerging from the universities and "instead of going into Fleet Street, they have gone into the theatre." Result; "The majority of present Fleet Street critics are against intelligence in the theatre, because the intelligence they find there is greater than their own."

There is far too little criticism of critics, and this is enjoyable stuff. What is missing from it is a bit of name naming. Just a couple of quotes of chapter and verse would not only add sting but give the reader a chance to assess the cogency of Bryden's contention. Bryden refers to "a dozen or so new plays" produced by the RSC, the reviews of which dismayed him, and I'm trying to remember which they could have been, these products of lofty intelligences operating on a level to which mentally inadequate reviewers might aspire but could hardly hope to attain. Duck Song, perhaps; Section Nine? Jingo? The mind, here below, reels.