I should know about the importance of trying to get a better work-life balance, but like Quentin Letts - who was profiled in the Independent on Sunday recently until the headline “He’s got more columns than the Colosseum” - I work hard, player harder, and don’t sleep enough. Quentin’s working day is cited in the piece as sometimes lasting 19 hours, and it does for me, too: no wonder I am writing this at 5.30am!
Quentin, however, diversifies a lot more than I do - as well as theatre reviews, he also writes parliamentary sketches, a weekly satirical column, and supplies lots of anonymous diary stories, and is now apparently being offered out by a public speaking agency at £3,000 to £5,000 per engagement, who are promoting him as being “known for his sharp wit and logical arguments.”
But as Quentin also says in the piece, “I think we’re probably the last generation that’s going to make a living out of newspapers. I suspect in 10 years’ time it’s going to be much harder to turn a shilling.” That chilling thought - that we’re reaching the end of a particular road - is also what keeps me writing at all hours (and means I am also making a modest step at diversifying, too, with a travel piece on Las Vegas to write tomorrow for an in-flight magazine). But being a theatre critic — as Quentin’s own presence amongst the first night throng also indicates - is nowadays sometimes just part of a portfolio of jobs that a journalist might have, rather than a full-time job in itself.
Tim Walker of the Sunday Telegraph is also the editor of the Mandrake column in that paper, and now has his work cut out for him providing the daily paper with the column, too.
It does mean, however, that the role - and authority - of individual critics is being dissipated. While Quentin, astonishingly, not only manages to get to most West End openings and even last week travelled to Birmingham for a regional one, too (Hapgood at Birmingham Rep), and has an occasional deputy, Patrick Marmion, to sweep up some of the fringe openings, others do not simply have the time to cover the waterfront anymore. Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, for instance, had just one review by Mr Walker, while the rest of the spread was filled by the excellent Tim Auld (who reviews most weeks now, but also has a day job on the Sunday Telegraph’s Stella magazine) and Robert Gore-Langton.
But though managing three critics instead of one may give the arts editor a scheduling headache, at least the paper is making an effort to keep up the coverage. The Sunday Times, too, seems to spread the load: while it used to be that former chief critic John Peter - surely the hardest working of all critics in his time - would regularly travel the length and breadth of the country and file up to five or six reviews a week, yesterday’s paper saw him once again doing impressive regional duty in Stratford-upon-Avon, Birmingham and Manchester, while the now lead critic Christopher Hart confined himself to one show at the Donmar Warehouse, and Louise Wise did two London fringe offerings.
JP was one of the few regular national critics I recognised at Manchester’s Royal Exchange last Monday, along with Sam Marlowe of The Times, when I went to see The Glass Menagerie’s opening night. Time was that the massed ranks of national critics would turn out for an Exchange opening, especially one with some star power as this one did, with Brenda Blethyn playing Amanda Wingfield. It turns out that The Observer was there, too, but while chief critic Susannah Clapp filled her column with just two London openings (Fram at the National and Small Change at the Donmar), Clare Brennan reviewed it for The Observer, along with Hapgood.
But then we can’t, of course, be everywhere. Although I did make the effort to get to Manchester, I’ll be the first to confess that I don’t get out-of-town nearly enough; there’s enough to do in London as it is. And with marathons like the RSC’s Histories swallowing up an entire day and the previous night as well last week, it was a heavy week. Mind you, I was surprised that the Evening Standard’s review of the marathon didn’t appear till Friday.
A plan hatched by the National with the Critics’ Circle to start allowing critics to attend final previews - which it often does informally, anyway, and Kate Bassett, for instance, took advantage of last week with Fram since it opened on Thursday and her deadline is Thursday morning - failed because the Standard insisted that if its critic attended early, they would publish early, since they wanted to maintain their edge in overnight reviewing. This would have meant that it negated the effect of an embargo to allow the other critics longer to file, and would have given the Standard an advantage they don’t actually have now, since those papers that do overnight reviews currently appear before the Standard does anyway. However, it seems that when that is precisely the advantage they had - since the marathon ended too late for any other critics to file an overnight - they failed to take it.
And the night after the marathon of course saw Fram open at the National; the Standard’s two critics, Nicholas de Jongh and Fiona Mountford, were both in attendance. Fiona often goes first nights, not just when she is reviewing, because she sensibly likes to keep abreast of what else is happening (it’s one of the curses of deputies that they don’t necessarily get to see the big shows otherwise). But on this occasion, the next day’s review was filed by her, not Nicholas. Perhaps he needed a break after the marathon.
But if some critics on the Sundays and dailies appear to have part-time duties, it’s a worry when some theatres do, too. The Young Vic may, nowadays, feel a bit like a trendy restaurant/cafe with a theatre attached rather than the other way around, as I’ve previously noted here, but its striking to also note that despite having three auditoria since their refurbishment, in the nearly two-month stretch from March 16 (after A Prayer for My Daughter ended the night before) and May 8 (when The Good Soul of Szechuan begins previews), there will have been just ten performances in total in the main house, and those with productions of a visiting company, English National Opera.
I was at the opening of Punch and Judy on Saturday, and it occurred to me what a monumental piece of subsidised waste this appeared to be: with a potential nightly audience of 470, the total run of five performances will be seen by a maximum of 2350 people - eight bodies short of the stated capacity of 2358 that could attend one performance at ENO’s home base, the London Coliseum. Yet the show will have had five weeks rehearsal, and used the subsidised staffing efforts of two theatres, to put it on. Art isn’t necessarily for everybody - and Birtwistle’s opera certainly isn’t - but should it be put on for the benefit of so very few?
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