Putting the critical knife in….

Hell hath no fury like a critic scorned. Michael Coveney, until 18 months ago theatre critic for the Daily Mail, was unceremoniously ejected from a seat he had occupied for the previous seven years, and eventually replaced (after the Mail flirted with other candidates, including – bizarrely – actress and sometime novelist Nichola McAuliffe) by the paper’s own parliamentary sketch writer Quentin Letts.

In today’s Observer, he finally gets his revenge – as well as on the successors to two posts he might have hoped to have been in the running for, when the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph chief critics became vacant after the retirement of the Johns Peter and Gross respectively (though Peter has oddly clung on, still filing reviews as conscientiously as before for everything but the lead event of the week).

Of Letts, he writes, he is “not so much a voice of the theatre in the Mail as a voice of the Mail in the theatre”; and citing the appointments of Victoria Segal on the Sunday Times and Rebecca Tyrrel on the Sunday Telegraph, writes that this suggests “that theatre is now fair game for anyone who can turn a phrase.” But, he goes on, “Would a sports editor hire a soccer reporter who had not been immersed in the sport since his earliest years and never been to Old Trafford or Goodison Park?”

The result, he says, is that “even when the writing is stylish, reviews will often lack the knowledge that was taken for granted a generation ago. And increasingly, editors are sending in the critical clowns in the true joke spirit of contemporary journalism. These witty fellows are best, and worst, represented by Toby Young in The Spectator.”

Coveney makes a valiant cry not for clowns but for new critical ring-masters (and harder task masters): “I am not suggesting that today’s broadsheet – let alone tabloid press – should come over all high-toned and learned when confronted with a new Alan Ayckbourn comedy or the latest drug-fuelled shocker at the Bush Theatre. But let’s hear it once more for experience, knowledge and seriousness. What is needed is a new group of younger critics who will combine the enthusiasm of the aficionado with the rigour of the informed task-master. Such a group is nowhere to be seen.”

Although Coveney has, from time to time, turned up reviewing variously in the pages of The Observer itself (a paper he was previously critic of, before he was lured by the lucre of the Mail to replace the late Jack Tinker), New Statesman and lately The Independent, as well as on radio, his own critical voice is nowhere to be heard regularly. In the midst of his rallying cry against the devaluing of the currency of criticism, it is his own, unspoken loss of a permanent outlet that you also feel most keenly here.

And the great pity is that, outside of the continuing astonishing craft (and graft) of Billington (Guardian), Nightingale (Times) and Spencer (Telegraph), there are few equals in the trade of filing trenchant, worthwhile criticism “overnight” than Coveney.

Overnight, of course, is a misnomer, since in order to make it into the next day’s paper, there is no such luxury as a full night to write a review in, but it has to be filed within an hour or so of curtain down, sometimes less. (Which is why, as the curtain falls on a first night, you see a phalanx of critics scurrying up the aisle, on which they’ve handily been seated for exactly this reason. Of course, many of my colleagues who don’t “overnight” join them simply for a quick getaway).

But the web is creating new opportunities, and as well as my national paper reviewing responsibilities (which I do for the Sunday Express), I am also elsewhere now filing “same night” reviews – posted ‘live’ on the night a show opens, just as soon as I’ve written it, but invariably long before midnight. Apart from the instant radio reviews that are sometimes carried by programmes like BBC Radio 4’s Nightwaves, I think this could be a serious claim to being the first review of any to appear.