I threw up watching Elaine Paige…. (and reading AA Gill)….

No, that isn’t a critical response to watching Elaine Paige again in The Drowsy Chaperone, as I was doing on Friday evening, but a purely physical one. I had, it’s true, not been feeling quite myself all day, and had laid low at home instead of taking myself into my office. (Although I am freelance, I rent an office, roughly five minutes walk from my flat next door to the Menier Chocolate Factory, so that I have somewhere to go to in the mornings and people to interact with, rather than out of my bedroom and into the lounge which is the usual lot for freelancers).

But I had been greatly looking forward to seeing The Drowsy Chaperone once again since it’s a hoot (and EP is a self-satirising delight), and even if I was feeling a little whoozy myself, took myself into town at the end of the day to meet a friend and see the show. There are no centre aisles anymore at the Novello Theatre, so I was seated in the middle of a row. Within minutes of the show starting, however, I turned to my companion and said I think I’d have to get out, as I thought I might be sick. So I stumbled out over the rest of the row during an applause break and promptly retreated to the loo, where I was.

At least I thought ahead a bit, but the absence of a centre aisle here might have rendered me susceptible to being the cause of something that a friend of mine once bore horrific witness to at a Richmond matinee: a case of projectile vomiting by one patron over the rows in front of him. But the loss of the centre aisle, it seems, is not just a practical problem for me, but is something that is much to the chagrin of my critical colleagues, apparently, according to the silliest of the silly accusations that AA Gill threw at the theatre critics in his pointless cover feature on the supposedly parlous state of theatre criticism in yesterday’s Sunday Times Culture section. Let’s ignore if we can (though it’s difficult to do so) the pompously smirking self-regard of the cover picture that makes the author not just the star of the story but of the week (was the Sunday Times that desperate yesterday)? Or the fact that the Sunday Times has done more to diminish the status of its theatre coverage than any other paper, relegating its much-respected and long-serving number one theatre critic John Peter – of whom producer Bill Kenwright said in the round-up of critical fraternity in The Independent earlier this year, “a JP rave can sell more seats than any other critic” – to number two, while putting in his place someone who reviews just one show a week?

But the real point of AA Gill’s piece seems to be to make the self-aggrandising point that it’s the work of good food critics, presumably like his good self, that have led to its current high chattering classes status: “Every room in the culture needs strong criticism; it needs committed critics to keep the form strong and innovative. Look at restaurants and food. The incremental improvement in the quality and sophistication and enjoyment of eating, cooking and buying food has coincided with the rise of good, angry, witty, opinionated writing.”

He then makes a seriesof astonishing and impertinent claims: “What the critics actually have to say about the theatre is growing in irrelevance, mostly because none of us knows what they think about the theatre…. The only context for theatre in their reviews is other theatre. Drama exists in a closed museum of nostalgic experience. Yet theatre is all about the real world. How often do you hear a critic mention seat prices, or whether the stalls might be value for money for an audience that probably doesn’t get to the theatre more than twice a year? The critics’ experience rarely seems to coincide with the lives of those sitting with them in the dark.”

Actually, some of us mention seat prices quite often. I wrote an entire feature on it for The Stage a few weeks ago. The other night, after the opening night of The Lord of the Rings, I was interviewed by a TV station after the show, and was asked if I thought the show warranted the reputed £12.5 million that had been spent on it. I replied that the more pertinent question wasn’t how much it cost to put on, but how much it cost to see: was it worth the £60 it cost to buy a top price ticket? (In my opinion, yes it is). But on the Sunday Times online, someone has replied to AA Gill’s invective, and agreeing with him about the failure of critics to mention seat prices – “or programme prices or bar prices or booking fees or sight-lines and audibility from the balcony” – adds, “Thank goodness for the blogosphere which is giving a voice to real paying theatregoers and their real world concerns. Check out West End Whingers, City Slicker, Interval Drinks and any other number of London theatre blogs for a fresh perspective.”

We are, its true, getting a greater – and welcome – democracy of opinion about London theatre than before, in which the public, who actually buy the tickets and support the theatre, are having their say as never before: indeed, the free London Lite makes a daily highlight of a public review, often wildly at divergence with the critical opinion, but unlike the critics’ reviews, we don’t have an idea of who the writer is or what their preconceptions are.

Critics are paid to do what they do precisely because they (hopefully) have a wider frame of reference than the public that their opinions can be tested against (and the public, in turn, likewise acquire a frame of reference from reading a critic regularly to test their own against). There’s also a key difference between writing about food or TV, as Gill does of both, and theatre: everyone eats (and most people watch TV), so everyone has an opinion about it. For Gill, though, the quality of the writing itself may be more important than the authority of what is being said.

The Sunday Times also asked a number of directors and producers what they thought about the state of criticism, and as ever it was Peter Hall, who — taking the long view, born of his considerable experience and earned authority – was able to say, “I think critics are better today than when I started: better informed and with a more international view. None of us likes being criticised, any more than we like school reports, but criticism is an essential part of life, and critics serve the public well.”

Kingsley Amis once famously said that a bad review might spoil your breakfast, but it shouldn’t spoil your lunch, and in this spirit, I shouldn’t allow a bad article about critics to have spoiled mine. But as it is, and returning to where I started, having spent Friday evening throwing up, I couldn’t eat lunch anyway and was laid low for most of the weekend, so I cancelled most of it: I was due to see two shows on Saturday and another yesterday afternoon, but bowed out of all three. However, I finally dragged myself out to the beautifully refurbished Royal Festival Hall last night for an amazing Philharmonia Orchestra concert featuring Mitsuko Uchida playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 25 in C, which was a tonic for the soul (and a still-dodgy belly).

Live music is one of life’s great pleasures: inhabiting the same sound space as music is being conjured in front of you can, like great theatre, be a deeply spiritual experience. And the best part of the new Festival Hall is that it proves that it doesn’t have be a physically punishing one, either: the seats are blissfully comfortable and every creature comfort has been thought of, including a drink’s holder (during a press tour of the venue a few weeks ago, it was pointed out that these were mainly for pop concerts so that people could bring drinks in, which they would do anyway, and this way there was somewhere to put them rather than on the floor. But last night I used it to hold my water bottle, which was very handy!). I love the Royal Court for the same reason: not just the thoughtfulness of the “love seats” idea (in which you can remove the armrest between yourself and your companion for greater intimacy), but also the handy, airline-type pocket located in the back of the seat in front of you, so you have somewhere to put your programme.