You should never, of course, believe everything you read in the papers (including, of course, expecting the critics to necessarily reflect public taste as I was writing only yesterday)!, so before we get too exercised about Nick Hytner’s alleged dismissal of some of my colleagues in yesterday’s Times, we need to find out the context in which he said it.
But as reported in The Times (and then given a full-page feature in the Standard later yesterday, under the headline, “Now theatre critics are panned”), he has complained, “I think it’s fair enough to say that too many of the theatre critics are dead white men. They don’t know it’s happened to them but it has”, he is quoted as saying.
He was apparently responding to the negative overnight reviews for the National’s stage version of A Matter of Life and Death, three of which – it is true – were written by men well into their sixties, The Guardian’s Michael Billington, Benedict Nightingale of The Times, and the Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh. But the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer, who was also negative, is not much older than Hytner himself. And he took the extraordinary step of linking their age to supposed sexism in their attitudes to the fact that the director of A Matter of Life and Death is a woman. Apparently, women directors – and particularly lesbian directors — get a significantly different treatment at the hands of the “dead white men” who are reviewing than men: “I know that Katie Mitchell gets misogynistic reviews, where everything they say is predicated on her sex. Gay males have never had a problem in the theatre … The ones who have it worst are the gay women. They really get it in the neck and there’s a lot of sniggering.” I didn’t, however, notice any such misogyny over the reception given by the “dead white men” to Marianne Elliott’s production of Pillars of the Community for the NT or Much Ado About Nothing for the RSC. Or indeed, of any sniggering when it comes to the work of Phyllida Lloyd or Deborah Warner, for instance.
He goes on to note that he’s not the only one exercised about this fact: “In private the female critics are voluble about this,” he says, and whatever else he is saying, he is also breaching an easily-traced confidence, not to mention betraying a note of sexism himself, in also saying, “I think it’s a very good thing that at least on Sunday there’s a female voice or two amongst the theatre critics”. Actually, there’s more than a voice or two – the Sundays have three first-string theatre critics who are women, the Observer’s Susannah Clapp, the Independent on Sunday’s Kate Bassett, and the Mail on Sunday’s Georgina Brown. But there are also numerous other female voices on the critical benches, from Jane Edwardes in Time Out and Claire Alfree in Metro to such influential deputies as Lyn Gardner in The Guardian, Sam Marlowe in The Times and Fiona Mountford in the Evening Standard. To fail to acknowledge them reeks of Hytner’s own of dismissal of their presence.
It would, in fact, be far more pertinent to note the absence of black or Asian critics amongst the critical fraternity, but I didn’t notice Hytner commenting on the absence of such commentary in his own well-received production of Rafta, Rafta – an Asian play that, it might be noted in reply, is being directed by a middle-aged, middle-class white director. Instead of giving an Asian director the opportunity to stage it, he has kept it for himself.
As Benedict Nightingale noted in his well-aimed riposte yesterday — a day on which he happened to be celebrating his 68th birthday – “Let me defend my tribe. We have a far broader spread of critics, in terms of gender and age, than when I started reviewing. Personally, I vow to give up when I lose my sight, hearing, enthusiasm or belief in gender equality. And I’m stunned to discover that Nick, so correct in other ways, is an ageist bigot. “ Next month, Nick Hytner is coming to talk to a meeting of the Critics’ Circle. It certainly promises to be an interesting meeting…. Watch this space!
