Actors, directors and playwrights routinely have to regularly face the slings and arrows of outrageous reviews, but what happens when critics themselves face the critics? It’s particularly difficult when, within the small world we operate in and see each other across the aisle vitually every night, the critic who suddenly finds the boot is on the other foot has to face the fact that its his own colleagues who are doing the kicking. Toby Young and Lloyd Evans, then job-sharing on The Spectator, found this out the hard way when they multi-tasked to write two plays that were seen at the King’s Head. Next up to face up to his critical colleagues on the other side of the pen will be Nicholas de Jongh, who has written a play that will be premiered at the Finborough next year.
But what happens when the critic is as almost universally admired as Michael Billington?
Reviewing Michael’s new book State of the Nation, a survey of the state of British theatre since 1945, his Daily Telegraph opposite number Charlie Spencer admits that there are moments when Billington “scares the hell out of me. A knowledgeable and witty companion, there is also a faint light of fantacism in his eye.” He admires Michael’s “freshness”, comments that he is “ideally placed to write this book”, and coos admiringly that he is “first-rate when it comes to spotting themes in the diverse work he has seen, and his book is an impressive monument to a professional life well spent.”
But there are also moments, Charlie later admits, that made him – a self-confessedly “crusty, middle-aged Tory” – feel “like hurling the book across the room”. There’s an obvious ideological divide – “his left-wing politics, nailed to the mast at every opportunity, also began to get on my nerves”, says Charlie, and adds, “Particularly obnoxious is his reverence for back-number dramatists such as Edward Bond and Trevor Griffiths, who spent much of the 1960s and 1970s inflicting their dreary hard-left politics on an ever-diminishing audience”. But there’s also a difference in taste: “The author writes with enthusiasm and insight, but he rarely makes the theatre sexy, glamorous or fun (and it is often all those things).” Charlie concludes, “Nevertheless, there is an alternative history to be written about the British stage since 1945, which would celebrate the dotty musicals, light comedies, creaky thrillers and trouser-dropping farces that Billington almost entirely ignores. It would be a less serious book, but it would also be more fun, and tell us just as much about the state, and values, of the nation.” (Is Charlie writing his own book pitch there? I hope so).
Billington himself insists in a feature in yesterday’s Guardian that “one of the pleasures of being a reviewer is finding oneself reviewed”. But one of the luxuries of Michael’s own tenure at The Guardian is that he has a chance to reply: “My old mate Charles Spencer in the Telegraph and Lloyd Evans in the Spectator have a go at me for underplaying the role of popular theatre and vilifying Margaret Thatcher. I’d accept the first but reject the second charge; or, if I do attack Mrs T, it is because I genuinely believe Britain’s political, moral and cultural climate was damaged by her free-market philosophy.”
But Michael also notices that, for all the critical attention he receives from colleagues, something else has an even bigger impact: “I’ve learned one other lesson in the past week: that 10 minutes of airtime on Start the Week counts for as much as a print review. I’m staggered by the feedback you get from a Monday morning slot on Radio 4. But if a 9am encounter with Andrew Marr can generate so much interest, it raises a disturbing question: are book critics, just like the rest of us in the comment trade, in danger of becoming a marginalised species?”
Michael may have hit the nail on the head: having had his cake and eaten it, there may be hardly any crumbs of comfort for the rest of us amongst our duly marginalised trade. But radio, too, was once written off in the new media age – and continues, as Michael shows, to be still hugely influential. So maybe we shouldn’t write away the written word yet.
Universally admired amongst his peers and colleagues, perhaps, but in the blogosphere Michael is the most regular Aunt Sally, used to personify the alleged conservatism of the main print critics in terms of both theatrical form and genre. This may itself be in large measure a function of his status, but it also seems that a lot of his non-review writing in recent months has taken note of this and carries an edge of self-defence or even defiance in this regard.