Anyone fancy being a theatre critic?

In an age of Pop Idol, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and Big Brother, where anyone can become a pop star/millionaire/celebrity in the flash of a television minute, it seems that theatre reviewing, too, is open season nowadays. It’s not just that parliamentarians like Michael Portillo have managed to achieve a regular spot doing so, in the pages of the New Statesman; but also that his replacement recently in a week when he was off was none other than Julian Clary, to review I Am My Own Wife currently at the Duke of York’s (presumably on the grounds that it’s one homosexual reviewing a play about another).

Clary comments on the dexterity of the solo actor Jefferson Mays who has to play the characters – whom he proceeds to list as “trannies, Nazis, commies, cockneys, even Japanese reporters” – and adds, “He’ll need a baked potato in the interval to keep his strength up, I thought to myself.” Clary tells us that he himself was fortified by booze, admitting, “I was giddy with admiration by the end, unless we put that down to the two cheeky glasses of Sauvignon Blanc I drank in the interval.”

So that’s how you review a play!

Rather more diligent work, however, has been turned in for the last 14 years by Beryl Bainbridge, who – I’ve obviously not been keeping up here! – I’ve just discovered has been reviewing theatre for all that time for The Oldie magazine. I found this out thanks to a recent book review in the Sunday Times for a collection of her reviews that has just been published, entitled Front Row: My Life in the Theatre. Perhaps I’ve not noticed, however, because she’s not exactly on the first night list, it seems: according to this review of her reviews, “Bainbridge knows that there is nothing like a matinée for taking the true temperature of a production, and she must be the only critic to make a habit of attending these slightly despised afternoon performances”, to which she goes, “often disguised as an ordinary member of the audience”.

Bainbridge, contends her reviewer Kate Saunders, “can never be a great critic of the theatre because she loves it too deeply and still identifies with the people on the other side of the proscenium arch”. Though we’ll pass over the assumption that the rest of us professional critics, by inference, don’t love the theatre deeply enough, Saunders quotes Bainbridge as saying regarding the fact that she identifies with the participants, “I’ve found it impossible to condemn out of hand anything I’ve seen in the past 11 years. Alas, I’m too conscious of the hopes, the money and the effort that goes into each production.”