The other day Lyn Gardner wrote a fascinating blog entry on The Guardian website, in which she fretted about raising people’s expectations by her rave review of Elling at the Bush. “Do please correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it was Alan Bennett who once suggested that theatre critics are like a group of giddy chorus girls out for a night on the town and just waiting to be f**d,” she wrote. And the way she wrote about Elling was as if she’d just been chorined, to continue where Bennett left off. “I just loved it to bits”, she admits. “The last time I felt quite like that at the Bush was watching the premiere of Beautiful Thing years ago. I’m clearly not alone in my enthusiasm for Elling. ‘There is no better theatrical tonic in town,’ declared Nicholas de Jongh. ‘Something rare and special,’ said Charlie Spencer.”
It leads her to worry, however: “What I wonder is if, two weeks from now, someone who read these rave reviews will come out of Elling and go: ‘What on earth were they all talking about? It’s good, but not that great. Did the Bush put happy pills in the Chardonnay on press night?’ I ask because quite frequently I come out of the theatre thinking those things myself…”
Mind you, the fact that we have so many critics in London means that we sometimes act as our own correctives: in comparison to the raves Lyn mentioned, John Peter in a muted two-star review in the Sunday Times wrote, mentions getting “fked”, in a different sense: “Elling (John Simm) is a mental hospital inmate, cool and precise, nattily dressed when not in his pyjamas. He shares a room with Bjarne (Adrian Bower), who discloses that he’s nearly 40 and has ‘never f*ed. Ah, well, you think, something to look forward to there… Alas, it never rises to its subject. The acting is fine; but I hope the Bush will remain a hothouse of new work, not of adaptations of adaptations.”
But Lyn goes on to point out a practical fact: “Critics, of course, get to see shows first and there is a huge difference between going to see a show with no expectations and going to see one with high expectations. Almost inevitably, the latter is a bit of a letdown. There are very few shows that live up to their hype.”
Actually, critics no longer always get to a show first: thanks to the practice of long previews and website bulletin boards, opinions on shows are nowadays often formed before we get there. And though I try to avoid the “chatter”, word inevitably filters through. Thus it was that, seeing Angela Lansbury’s Broadway return at a press performance last Friday in Deuce, I was pleasantly surprised: it wasn’t as bad as I was hearing. The law of negative expectation applied. Ditto, when the current London revival of Cabaret was in previews, the internet chatter was bad; and I remember reaching the interval on the first night and hesitantly revealing to my companion, “I don’t know if I’m getting this wrong, but I think this is rather wonderful….” The internet chatter had made me unsure of myself.
So if we can’t even trust ourselves, who can we trust? Lyn quotes Dominic Dromgoole in his book The Full Room saying that “our aesthetic is almost our last way of understanding ourselves” and that theatre is “too precious a resource to be spoiled by opinions, especially those of others … see what you see, and if you love it, love it and if you don’t, don’t big time. Bring all that you have to the occasion, whatever clumps of elegance or sewage that have stuck to you along the way but let it be your elegance and your sewage, no one else’s.” In other words, be true to our own feelings, at least. It’s the least a critic can do. But our readers should be on guard that we’re not always reliable guides. Unless you apply the law of negative expectation there, too – choose to follow a critic whom you invariably violently disagree with, and go to see whatever it is that they rave about. As Lyn remarks, “At this moment, there will be Guardian readers besieging the Shaw Theatre’s box office quite correctly knowing that if I loathed Menopause the Musical, they will love it. That is how it should be.”
