A young actress attacked me at a party recently. I had let slip that I write about the theatre. Her face twisted with aggression. Surely it was unethical, she said, for "one person's opinion" to stand in judgement over a show? What qualifications did I have? How could I review theatre when I had never acted? (I kept quiet about my rare amateur performances, so daringly wooden that I could be mistaken for part of the set.) I responded, trying to suppress my irritation. Did she really want plays to be assessed by committees? Which qualifications was she thinking of exactly? Could only trained chefs review restaurants? Nothing I said mattered. She knew, deep in her heart, that I was scum.
I have some sympathy with her. While a student, I worked on a number of productions. I wrote four plays which were performed at the Edinburgh Fringe (no great distinction-it is an unregulated festival). I know the anxious wait for a review to be published and then the sick feeling of wishing it never had been. ("All the characters come to seem rather tiresome, particularly when they are shouting at each other.") I am still involved, in a minor way, with a few small theatre companies.
Yet I am, against my best intentions, a theatre critic for, amongst others, London Metro and Radio 4's Front Row. I enjoy what I do and I would defend it. But I remain torn. I don't find myself unable to criticise things, but I find bad reviews linger with me after I have filed the copy or made the broadcast. I don't presume that my comments carry much weight. But I can easily imagine what it feels like to be told that your passionately-felt play is "awash with confusion" (a pulled punch, honestly) or that your emotional range is small (sorry, Jack Davenport). I find myself prey, in other words, to critic's guilt.
The animosity I encountered at that party is as old as theatre criticism itself. Stephen Fry, who famously did a runner from Simon Gray's Cell Mates after his performance received a slew of bad reviews, put critics first on his list of most hated things in the television programme Room 101. According to Dominic Dromgoole, in his excellent new book, The Full Room, critics are on the edge of psychosis: "Sitting, night after night, watching a variable phantasmagoria pass by, isn't the ideal prescription for a balanced world-view." More bitterly, some of those around the playwright Sarah Kane blamed her suicide in 1999 on the "London media."
Creators in any field have battles with their critics but in the theatre the hostility is bitterer and more general. This needs explanation. Part of the difficulty is that critics have, or are perceived to have, too much power. Partly it is the sharp distinction between critics and their object. Book reviewers are often themselves book writers, but theatre critics are almost never practitioners.
The theatre critic is outside the fold. He or she cannot be on the show's side, but is not really of the audience either. Like an awkward dinner guest, the critic must miss the alchemy that turns people into a group. As Benedict Nightingale has put it, "the reviewer must ensure that there's at least some tiny, guarded bit of himself watching himself in his more unguarded moments."
All critics must sheathe their hearts with ice. But criticising the live arts can seem particularly aggressive. The critic must, as it were, tell it to the artist's face. This is no doubt why directors and other backstagers are a little calmer towards the critical fraternity. It is the actors who must go back on stage again to do something difficult, highly personal and poorly understood, wondering whether the people in the dark have read that witty paragraph about their hammy moment in scene 12.
Most of all though, fuelling my guilt, is the disturbing thought that the theatre scorns critics because theatre criticism is not very good. Not because theatre critics lack ability, but because their job is in its nature flawed. Forced to assess a live experience, which will vary in quality, to some degree, every night, without benefit of pause or rewind, the critic is working against the odds-even now that overnight reviewing has largely been abandoned.
The record of modern theatre criticism, says Nightingale, is "appalling." Ibsen's A Doll's House and Ghosts, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Pinter's The Birthday Party, Edward Bond's Saved and John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance-all landmark works of contemporary drama-were treated with contempt by many British reviewers. True, these are difficult examples. But how else should a critic be tested?
And what if part of the reason actors dislike critics is that critics don't know about acting? Irving Wardle, one of the great post-war critics, says in his book Theatre Criticism, "reviewers are seldom able to analyse what actors do." The best thing, he continues, is to describe what they do. But this is difficult and requires more space than an adjective such as "warm," or "mannered." Notice too, that often descriptions of actors' performances are actually descriptions of the characters they play.
I am being harsh. I have not mentioned the glories of Shaw or Tynan, the genius pinpointed and supported, the dead tissue surgically removed. I have not quoted Hazlitt's immortalising words on Edmund Kean. But this guilt is worth nurturing. Though modesty can paralyse, critic's guilt-that feeling of divided and restless sympathies-makes a better critic.
