Let(t)s get personal….

Theatre critics are a funny lot. Sometimes we just can’t resist writing about each other. This blog, of course, is regularly a testament to this kind of navel gazing. The pages of Theatre Record, the fortnightly journal that reprints all of the national reviews in one place, are launched every issue with an editorial from its compiler, Ian Shuttleworth, in which he regularly observes critical trends and dissents. And for someone from outside the throng who looks even more obsessively at us, you need to go to rcubednews.com for a collection of newsletters (now numbering 158, and all archived for retrieval) that Ian Senior has been writing about us since December 2000, throwing down a gauntlet to those he disagrees with. As an economist, he has also devised a rather bizarre formula for assessing the financial impact that our negative reviews can have on a production. (It can’t have worked for We Will Rock You, however he works it out). Right now, there’s also an interesting discussion taking place on the Guardian’s arts blogs about the role of critics, especially now that the blogosphere has allowed the public to add their own voices to ours.

But given how squeezed we are for space in our regular columns, it’s rare for us to use our few words to talk more generally about the critical discourse, let alone each other. But in his review of the National’s new production of The Man of Mode in yesterday’s Daily Mail, Quentin Letts wrote of star Tom Hardy that he did not, “despite his tattoed abdomen and much pelvis-rotating, did I find him entirely convincing as a piece of male phwoarr.” And then he added, “Maybe I’m not the best judge. We’ll have to see what the queen bees of the Critics’ Circle make of his allure.”

Since I was only seeing the play last night, I sent Quentin an e-mail yesterday, saying that I would duly let him have my verdict today. But quite apart from the assumption that gay men might all share the same taste in male totty, there’s also the implication that there are a lot of queen bees about amongst our throng, from which he is also keen to let us know that he is not a part. The Independent media column also made a similar suggestion a few months ago, following the fracas over some of the homophobic reviews of Bent that then added a new level of homophobia in their reporting of a row between Simon Callow and Charlie Spencer that had taken place at a subsequent first night. The Independent asked, “Whether he’s wise to pick a fight on the issue with London’s critics – roughly half of whom are themselves members of the gay community – remains to be seen.” The piece was illustrated by a Tom of Finland illustration of two leather-jacketed and capped men in which one says to the other, “I’ll meet you later in the theatre critics bar.”

As I wrote at the time, “Out of the fourteen lead critics working for the national papers, I only know of four of us who are in fact gay. So it’ll be a small gathering in the theatre critics’ bar if that’s the case, and nothing like roughly half of our fraternity.”

But what of it? Nowadays we know there are gay people in all walks of life, not just the obvious professions, and even then not as many as you’d think (though as a friend pointed out to me yesterday, we now have gay men at the helm of four of our most important London theatres – the National, Royal Court, Young Vic and Donmar – that still leaves plenty of theatres still being run by the straight majority). But if gay critics were to devote as much attention to describing the contours of Mr Hardy’s body as some of our straight brethren did, for instance, to describing Kelly Reilly’s breasts when she appeared in Piano/Forte at the Royal Court, we’d be accused of indecency. Charlie Spencer may have risen to the occasion, in every sense, when he described Nicole Kidman’s brief nude scene in the Donmar Warehouse production of The Blue Room as “pure theatrical viagra”, but I’m not going to stoop so low as to go Phwoarr! to Mr Hardy. At least not in public.