Haunted by the internet…..

I was harangued on Friday night by Nicholas de Jongh, theatre critic of the Evening Standard, who had stumbled upon something I’d written five years ago for an American theatre website, in which I named (my own list of) Britain’s Top 50 theatre people, including whom I thought were then London’s five most influential critics. He wasn’t arguing about being included, but about what I said about him. I couldn’t precisely remember, but when I got home, I did a web search myself, and found that I’d said, he’s “important because of the readership he serves, but is an uncommonly hard taskmaster who rarely seems to enjoy actually going to the theatre.” He’d translated that to me as “you said I never like anything”, which isn’t true either of what I said or of his own reviews; but it’s true that he’s, to put it lightly, hard-to-please.

It may be that my colleagues and myself are too lenient, but it always strikes me that Nick – in his immensely powerful position as one of the spokesmen for theatre who speaks directly and only to Londoners, as opposed to the rest of the national pack who speak to the whole country – is not exactly an enthusiast for most of what he sees. Even his praise often comes heavily qualified. (And there’s often an intriguing mismatch between the banner headline and the review itself, which isn’t his fault – but often the headline writers try to be more positive than he is).

But the Evening Standard, like most papers, is being heavily hit in the readership stakes, and its star – and circulation – is falling fast, so his power is gradually being eroded. In the process, one review that really counts nowadays is the one in the free Metro morning paper, since more people will see that than the Evening Standard. Fortunately, Claire Alfree and her team are far more constructive, too.

But if my own web words came back to haunt me, here’s an intriguing fact about Charles Spencer’s recent Daily Telegraph review of Scrooge that I commented on here before: it has vanished from the paper’s website. If you visit the place it used to be at — http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;jsessionid=2D4X31HFVOD5FQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?view=DETAILS&grid=P8&xml=/arts/2005/11/10/btscrooge10.xml) — a message says, “This story has been temporarily removed”. The show, of course, closed last night; but that doesn’t mean the review needed to be taken down. One wonders if darker forces were at work….

Finally, talking of dark forces in the world of criticism, I see that today introduced us to the latest celebrity-hiring-as-critic in the form of Sunday Telegraph’s appointment of novelist Zadie Smith as its film critic. This has been happening a lot in the theatre reviewing world, with Michael Portillo now theatre critic at the New Statesman, Toby Young on the Spectator and parliamentary correspondent Quentin Letts on the Daily Mail, appointments that have each overlooked the traditional expertise expected of critics in favour of their name value.