Out of kilter critics…. including me!

Now I know how Nicholas de Jongh often feels. I was going to write a blog entry about how divergent his reviews sometimes are, and in particular, about how his heartfelt rave for last week’s opening of Embers – “I rate it as one of the major experiences of my theatre-going life” – was at odds with most of his colleagues, such as Charles Spencer’s declaration in the Daily Telegraph that was its polar opposite, “There are few surprises here, just great acres of terrible tedium and verbiage to negotiate. You consult your watch, expecting at least half an hour to have passed, only to find that the hand has advanced by only three minutes.”

But today I can’t afford to be quite so smug. I filed a very enthusiastic notice for last night’s opening of Sinatra at the London Palladium – “it distils the songs through an eye-poppingly lavish multi-media experience that contributes interpretative layers and textures of its own that make you see and hear these mostly familiar, classic songs in a new choreographic and musical light” – only to turn to today’s papers and find that few of my peers agree, and of which Paul Taylor’s review in The Independent is a representative sampling: “There is something decidedly rum about a theatrical event where everything – the 24-piece orchestra, a 20-strong dancing troupe – is live apart from the star.”

I’m not going to use this blog to defend my review – it’s out there (or soon will be, when its published on theatre.com later today, and another version appears in the Sunday Express this weekend), and speaks for itself. But it does raise an issue that only last week I was speaking about to a group of students who had come to a session called “Play the Critic”, organised by the Mousetrap Foundation at the Old Vic, in which a pair of critics – I was joined by Michael Coveney – and a director (David Grindley in our case) talk through the process of criticism, and the students then go away to write their own review of something they have seen that we will then have an opportunity to look over with them ourselves.

What I was keen to point out that there is no such thing as a “right” or “wrong” review; just a cogently argued review or not. Ultimately what we do is always a declaration of taste and opinion; and there’s no objective criterion for that. But we hopefully draw on our extensive theatregoing experience and informed opinion to do so. Now the reader may or may not agree with us – but if they follow us across a period of time, they will soon learn our prejudices and idiosyncrasies, and know whether to heed or discard our views.

But I think that the critical response to this show also highlights something that Matthew Gale, the producer of the critically lambasted production of The Creeper (by most everyone, including me) wrote in yesterday’s Guardian about its reception. “Everyone involved in the production wanted to do this play, because we saw something in it that the critics didn’t. I think audiences see more of what we do than the critics seem to – the response when we tried The Creeper out in the autumn was terrific, and that’s why we brought it to London.” He went on of his star, Ian Richardson, that he “likes to say that he’s not just an actor but an entertainer, and that’s how producers think of themselves, too. We’re there to put on plays that audiences, not just critics, want to see. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t survive in the commercial world. At times I feel that critics are narrowing the choice for their readership, by attacking plays like this. The Creeper may not be a cutting-edge modern drama, but it is an entertaining traditional play. If audiences are going to have a diverse choice of shows, they should be able to see old-fashioned plays like this, too.”

Ultimately, of course, it’s also the public who decides: they voted with their feet (and credit cards) to make We Will Rock You into a hit, despite what the majority of the critics said. And I think they may well do the same with Sinatra at the London Palladium.