It’s not, of course, the business of critics to be liked, let alone loved. Yet the passing yesterday of Clive Barnes, at the age of 81, has provoked an outpouring of generous tributes: in a video on the New York Post website, the paper for which he was both the lead theatre and dance critic for over 30 years and for whom he was still writing as recently as last month when he reviewed the current Broadway revival of All My Sons, Harvey Fierstein says, “I loved the man, though I’m not fond of most critics. A lot of critics just don’t review what they see -they come in with an idea of what it should be and then review what they think it should have been, I always found that Clive reviewed what he actually saw, and that made him quite unique in my book.”
Another Broadway veteran, John Cullum, declares, “I always turned to Clive to get the opinion that I thought was the most honest and least opinionated, from a person who really loved the theatre.” And Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organisation, added, “His enthusiasm for the theatre was reflected in his reviews, which were never cruel and did not involve any personal attacks on people in the business.”
Even press agents respected him: in an e-mail from leading Broadway press agents Boneau/Bryan-Brown yesterday mourning his passing, they wrote of him, “A true gentleman of the arts, we will miss seeing him on the aisle.” Readers of The Stage, of course, have long been familiar with his work, too, from the regular columns he used to file on Broadway theatre for the paper. So we will miss him here, too.
Barnes was a Broadway theatre institution for over 40 years, ever since he added the post of drama critic of the New York Times in 1967 to that of dance critic that he had already been lured over from London in 1965 to take over - and then held jointly until he moved to the Post in 1978 after the Times ordered him to relinquish the theatre beat.
But he didn’t do his job without controversy. In William Goldman’s now-legendary book on the 1967-1968 season - the one in which Barnes had just been elevated to his role as theatre critic of the New York Times - Goldman says, “Let me be quite blunt about this at the outset: I think Clive Barnes is the most dangerous, the most crippling critic in modern Broadway history, and I only hope he is dispensed with before these words reach print.”
Goldman wasn’t so lucky. But his analysis of the problems he saw with Barnes make interesting reading: “He is English. That, as we shall see, is one of the problems…” Later, he amplifies, “The man has a wild English bias.” And he goes on to declare, “This is so well known, so clear, that one of England’s best directors was forced to comment on it. ‘It really is embarrassing,’ he said to me. ‘It’s outrageous. Of course, I’m getting rich from it, but I shouldn’t think it would be pleasurable to you people’.” (I’d love to know who the director was, who was so intent on biting one of the hands that was clearly feeding him, in every sense)
But in the midst of Goldman’s Anglophobia, he accuses Barnes of being America-phobic: “The British preference, if that were all, would be devastating enough. But the fact is, it also distorts his views of American work.” He adduces as evidence Barnes’ review of the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s The Price, and says it proves, “the man cannot deal coherently with American drama”.
It is always the case that the holder of such an influential role as the chief critic of the New York Times is going to have his words and tastes minutely analysed. But it is also interesting to note that, after he decamped to the New York Post, he was never quite so carefully inspected, and his palpable enthusiasm for the theatre came to be actually respected - proving that it’s the job, not the man, that was being thus criticised.
In an interview that Michael Riedel did with Barnes some years ago on his weekly TV chat show Theatre Talk, he said of why he became a critic, “I wanted to be a part of the theatre. I couldn’t be an actor, because I stuttered; I never knew what directors did, and I don’t know that I even know today. Really it was a question of being an agent or something like that or a critic.”
He was nothing if not honest about his reasons for getting into this business. And the business got a lot out of him. May he rest in peace.
I found it unbelievable that members of an American theatre chat board used the occasion of his death to air their grievances about his reviews in an “I am not sad to see him go” kind of way.
Shame on them .
While one shouldn't speak ill of the dead , one should remember that Mr Barnes was never a respected drama critic - dance yes, but drama no. In all his time at either the Times and later the Post his reviews were badly written and inconsistent and sometimes he just plain got it wrong. In fact , other than his deep love for the works of Eugene O'Neil can you think of one playwright or composer who's work he championed? His reviews of the early Sondheim shows - Company and Follies are shocking in their failure to see what those shows were attempting and accomplishing. He was notorious for sleeping through shows ( as many critics do) and then raving about them the next day. Many times a bad show would get its only good review in the Post and one would read it knowing that it was written with getting a quote in the show's ads. This rarely happened when he was at the Times but once he moved to the Post it happened quite often. Over time his reviews grew to mean less and less - audiences, at least those that read the Post learned they couldn't trust him. I am sorry that he has died but as a voice of criticism in the theatre I would have to fall in the category of I am not sorry to see him go. He should've retired many years ago.
Not to be utterly pedantic (or, alternately, to be utterly pedantic), but I believe it was William Goldman who wrote "The Season," not William Gibson.
Very interesting look at the "reviews" the man himself got! I for one will miss him.