Whatever happened to theatre critics?

“One of the most characteristic sounds of the English Sunday,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt, in 1959, “is that of Harold Hobson barking up the wrong tree.” If that was what the writer made of the drama critic who championed Waiting for Godot and The Birthday Party, what would she have made of today’s younger theatre critics? Reading what passes for reviews in some of our newspapers and weeklies, it looks as if theatre criticism in Britain is heading for a complete breakdown.

Cultural criticism in general is not in a good state in Britain today. TV critics are ignorant of television’s past, wrong about the present and have no critical language to speak of either. There is only one major British film critic under sixty, and he writes for The New Yorker. It is more than fifty years since Robert Hughes started writing for Time magazine and John Berger presented Ways of Seeing, but apart from Michael Prodger there hasn’t been a British art reviewer since who can write anything like as well as either. Literary criticism, in the words of Martin Amis, feels “dead and gone”. Confined to the universities, crippled by Theory, it no longer matters as it did in the heyday of FR Leavis, Raymond Williams and George Steiner.

And yet none of these fields are in as bad a shape as theatre criticism today. This isn’t just a matter of one or two individuals. It is a sign of something troubling in the larger culture, at a crucial moment for British theatre.

Of course, we can disagree about particular plays and productions. That is what drives theatre criticism. Harold Hobson raved about the first performance of The Birthday Party; the other critics loathed it. Look Back in Anger received mixed reviews when it opened, and Tynan praised it to the skies. However, you need some kind of shared language to begin a conversation, some set of basic critical skills.

Harold Hobson

A few days ago my wife and I went to see Second Best at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith.  It was a one-man show with Asa Butterfield, best-known for the TV series, Sex Education, making his stage debut. He was astonishing. On stage for ninety minutes, he looked completely at ease. The packed house gave him a long standing ovation. When we got home, we read the reviews in mounting disbelief. Not a single five-star review. Most gave it a grudging  three stars. But worst of all, they often gave away key moments of the plot which would have spoiled the show for anyone who hadn’t yet seen it. The Guardian’s reviewer was typical: wrong in his most basic judgment calls, telling the reader nothing about the actor’s background, delighting in revealing crucial plot points.

It reminded me of an idiotic review of The Threepenny Opera in The Spectator, a few years ago. The critic wrote: “The story is a poor knock-off of Scarface. The plot makes no sense. It reminds me of a musical that I was in at Highgate Primary School that was written by one of the teachers…” He moved on to consider the cast: “The really surprising thing is how unattractive they all are. As a critic, I’ve come to expect actors to be either ugly or talentless but not both…”

The Observer, once home to Tynan and Orwell, published the same critic’s account of the RSC’s Much Ado… around the same time: ”Kirsten Parker, the actress splaying Hero, is exceedingly pretty, which is a real rarity on the West End stage … but more importantly, the two leads – Harriet Walter and Nicholas Le Prevost as Beatrice and Benedick – are superb. During the scene in which they first declare their love for one another, I was so overcome by emotion I thought I might pass out.”

Who needs knowledge and passion when you can have minor celebrities being amusing? The assumption here is that readers don’t expect anything more, indeed that’s what they want. Today’s critics should be on the side of the reader, and if the reader knows less, isn’t interested in the critical jargon, is intimidated by the traditional language of theatre criticism, then ditch it.

What is striking is how recent all this is. The generation of great British theatre critics has sadly passed, either retired or dead. I recently re-read Harold Hobson’s review in The Sunday Times in May 1958 of Pinter’s The Birthday Party. The production had already closed after a week, largely because of the negative reviews. Hobson was undaunted. He wrote, “Pinter, on the evidence of his work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.” He admired the play’s sense of threat. ”It cannot be seen, but it enters the room every time the door is opened. There is something in your past, it does not matter what, which will catch up with you… Mr Pinter and The Birthday Party, despite their experiences last week, will be heard of again. Make a note of the names.” Or take this review of Pinter’s The Homecoming by Penelope Gilliatt in The Observer in 1965: “The drama in The Homecoming is not the plot. In Pinter it never is. It consists in the swaying of violent people as they gain minute advantages…The sexual instinct in Pinter isn’t at all emotional or even physical: it is practically territorial.”

Penelope Gilliat

Neither review gives away key parts of the plot. Their basic judgment calls are spot on. The insights are fascinating: the importance of fighting for “minute advantages” and the “territorial” nature of sexual desire in Pinter.

Most disturbing of all, today there is no new generation in sight. This is unprecedented. Michael Billington was barely thirty when he began at The Guardian, older than Benedict Nightingale when he started at the New Statesman. Much is made of the fact that Tynan took over at The Observer when he was 27, but Hobson was just 31 when he began as a theatre critic and James Agate was 30 when he began at The Guardian. The great critics, in short, always began before they were forty. Who are their equivalents today? Where are the new, young voices in theatre criticism?

Kenneth Peacock Tynan

Tynan became the best-known theatre critic of his time because he wrote superbly. Take, for example, his response to Godot: it “jettisons everything by which we recognise theatre. It arrives at the custom-house, as it were, with no luggage, no passport and nothing to declare…” Reviewing The Quare Fellow, he wrote, “Behan’s tremendous new language is out on a spree, ribald, dauntless and spoiling for a fight…”

Or consider the intelligence in Harold Hobson’s distinction between two productions of Richard II in 1955. John Neville’s was a performance in the Gielgud mould, Joan Littlewood’s production more of an ensemble: “What Theatre Workshop aims at is an interpretation of the play, not a bravura performance.” It is hard to read his reaction to Peter Hall’s first production of Godot without sensing the excitement of the new: “Mr Beckett has any amount of swagger. A dusty, coarse, irreverent, pessimistic, violent swagger? Possibly. But the genuine thing, the real McCoy.”

Hobson and Tynan are the last theatre critics to feature in the new Dictionary of National Biography because they wrote well and championed the new. They weren’t simply chroniclers, they made different kinds of theatre possible. Confronted with the strangely new, they didn’t snigger, they tried to make sense of it, and when they felt – as with Osborne and Pinter, Beckett and the Berliner Ensemble – that they were encountering something extraordinary, they fought for it with tremendous passion.

Reading those first reviews, you feel as if you are sitting in on history.  Of course, they made mistakes. All critics do. They sometimes barked up the wrong tree, but they brought theatre to life. They tried to think through the unprecedented revolution in British theatre that was going on around them.

The greatest danger today, though, comes from elsewhere. In a culture which is dumbing down, theatre is one of the last bastions of experimentation and the avant-garde. Our middlebrow culture has seen off the avant-garde in cinema (compare the decline of European art films and art cinemas with the 1970s) and television.

Theatre, in short, keeps alive the distant past in an amnesiac culture (from Oedipus and Electra to Shakespeare and Racine). It tries to keep alive different kinds of language (from the lyricism of Jim Cartwright’s Road to Kushner’s Angels in America). It rejects insularity and parochialism, by bringing in productions from all around the world.

Theatre does this in the face of an increasingly intolerant culture, which aches for the familiar and the parochial. In the 1890s, it was Shaw who championed Ibsenism. In the 1950s, Tynan and Hobson defended Beckett, Pinter and Brecht . In the Seventies and Eighties, Billington, Nightingale and Peter defended The Romans in Britain and Bent. Today which critics will champion the new and the bold, in an increasingly conformist climate?

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.