It is always interesting when the subject of theatre reviews leaves the reviews pages themselves and turn up as part of a larger dialogue elsewhere. I see it as part of the job of this blog to monitor as well as provoke that discussion; and I have twice now already blogged about the reception to Nicholas de Jongh’s Plague Over England, first immediately after its opening, and then again yesterday, after the blatant exhibition of homophobia that was exhibited in the Sunday Times review.
At the risk of beating this subject to death, I return to it yet again today to direct you to some stories that have evolved out of it in the online and print pages of The Guardian.
First, the Guardian online published a blog by John Morrison last Friday, that wondered aloud whether de Jongh’s fellow critics “have left their critical brains behind in the foyer in praising this limp apology for a play”. Reviews, of course, are always a matter of opinion, not fact, and parading his own opinion that it’s a “limp apology of a play” isn’t necessarily evidence of there being a cloakroom for our brains having been on offer in the foyer of the Duchess.
But if The Guardian’s own online round-up of the early reviews insists that “the critical cabal has heaped it with praise”, Rhoda Koenig replied in a letter to The Guardian yesterday, “Your author may know where they meet to confer and cackle, but no one has told me. My review in the Independent the next day described the play as narrow, sentimental, heavy-handed, confusing and based on a false premise.”
Another letter in yesterday’s Guardian by Melanie Jessop - the actress, incidentally, whom we were not allowed to review when she took over from an indisposed Frances Barber in the RSC’s King Lear in 2007 — suggests that we should not have reviewed Plague Over England, either. There is, she suggests, an “obvious conflict of interest that should have made it impossible for them [the theatre critics] to review the West End revival of their critical colleague Nicolas de Jongh’s play Plague over England, on the grounds that it is “club dominated by men of a certain age, more than a few of whom must (please God!) be approaching retirement age, seems to be flagrantly attempting to boost the chances of commercial success of one of their own by encouraging members of the public to buy tickets for a show which they must secretly acknowledge is vain and abject.” (In which case, as Rhoda Koenig has wittily asked me today, “Who is SUPPOSED to review the play, if not critics? Fishermen? Dentists?”)
But Jessop’s assumption is based on several false premises, too - one that Michael Billington shoots down in a Guardian feature today. The conspiracy that Jessop identifies - “to puff a colleague’s work”, as Billington puts it - is a charge that he says is “as insulting as it is ill-informed”. And he proceeds to give plenty of evidence against the accusation. Amongst his points he says, “I’m also sorry to see the resurrection of the old ‘dead white males’ argument, first advanced, and then retracted, by Nicholas Hytner. It overlooks the simple fact that De Jongh’s play was reviewed, both in its initial run at the Finborough and now in the West End, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, by Susannah Clapp, Georgina Brown, Jane Edwardes, Claudia Pritchard, Kate Kellaway and Rhoda Koenig: none of these writers are members of any mythical old boys’ club.”
No, but most are members of the Critics’ Circle (though Rhoda resigned her membership, long before I became its chair, after Toby Young was admitted to the fold); so there is a club that we do belong to. But it is there not to police our collective opinions but to offer a forum to protect and promote the way we work, and provide a formal communication channel between the industry and the critics.
Billington also addresses one of the key questions of how we actually go about our night jobs, and I’m probably asked it more than any others: how well do we all get on, and do we confer over our opinions? Michael is right to say, “Critics don’t work as a team. We arrive separately and we leave in a hurry to get to our desks.” But though the latter is true of the small band of overnight critics of which he is an indispensable part, it’s not entirely true to say, “It’s the opposite of a social engagement: there is simply no time to chat.” We can and we do, both at the theatre (there’s always the interval, and we’re regularly plied with free interval drinks that not only keeps us in a huddle but also actively encourages us to chat) and sometimes away from it, whether electronically or in person. Indeed, one of my favourite jobs of all is convening and hosting regular discussions that are recorded and posted for all to hear on www.theatrevoice.com.
But Michael is also right to point out that critics don’t always fall over themselves to praise a colleague. Far from it: Rhoda Koenig once said in print of Michael’s Pinter biography, “This critic should spend more time at his desk and less on his knees.”
But the blogosphere also proves, as ever, that it isn’t just the critics who are part of this discourse anymore, but the public and other theatre practitioners who can actively participate in it, too. The best part of the unfolding Guardian blog on the play is the fact that Jasper Britton, who was part of the play’s early developmental readings and played the role of Gielgud in the original production at the Finborough last year, has rushed in to defend not only the director Tamara Harvey, who has come in for some public criticism, but also shone some revealing insights into the playwright’s own working processes.
He has also valiantly defended the director against one of the personal charges made against her by one contributor - since deleted by a moderator - and as he says, “I love the internet for lots of reasons but am beginning to hate it for more, not least the fact that gossiping, self-important, snide, insensitive, bitter and twisted little egos and failures can write any old BS about anyone they like. Or that they clearly hate, for whatever reason, arbitrarily”. Britton, who is about to star in a stage version of Simon Gray’s The Last Cigarette at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre, writes like Gray’s stream-of-consciousness reflections on the theatre; and it’s wonderful that there’s a public outlet for them here. If Gray were still alive, I can’t help but think he’d make a wonderful blogger. And I only wish that Jasper takes it up even more seriously!
If only DeJongh's play were as interesting, thought provoking, and well crafted as the blogs and comments about it have been. Who knew that such a dreary and ineptly produced evening could spark such heated and amusing debate?
A fair summary, Mark, but you will note that out of 30 or so comments on the Guardian site responding to my piece, not a single one from a paying theatregoer has liked the play. I can't remember an occasion when critical opinion and the views of ordinary playgoers have diverged so much. I am prepared to accept that critics aren't a cabal or a conspiracy, but I do think that the atmosphere generated by a packed house on a first night when the audience is willing the play to succeed and will laugh at any feeble Tunbridge Wells joke can be very misleading. On the night I saw it the play failed to cross the footlights and fell completely flat.
However unintentionally, that comment is probably more contentious per hundred words than the original article.
John, you're a veteran journalist yet you show no awareness of the unreliability of that journalistic Swiss-Army tool, the self-selecting sample: the balance of comments to your blog (after stripping out the ones you prefer not to count) are no more indicative of overall opinion than the results of a tabloid's premium-line phone poll. As for critical and audience opinion diverging, ladies and gentlemen, thump-thump-clap, thump-thump-clap, I give you We Will Rock You, and moreover I give you what until recently held the record for the West End's biggest-ever box-office advance, Dirty Dancing - nobody puts critics in a corner (they put us on the aisle with a bit of leg room). Then you suggest that we are swayed by press-night atmosphere, when it's precisely our job not to be, and there's no reason we should believe it in this case any more than on others. And finally you simply offer your own diverging opinion - which is fine, but doesn't disable ours in any way.
Remember, I was very ambivalent about Plague Over England, but when a majority disagree with me I don't go looking for conspiracy or freemasonry. All this seems to me to be just another example of the British resentment of... I don't want to say "intellect", because that's vain, nor "authority", because that's pretentious, and lo and behold I'm now kowtowing to that same mentality in my choice of words... I'm going to say "expertise", and the hell with it.
Actually, Ian I don't think the two examples of We Will Rock You or Dirty dancing apply here. They are musicals that please for give my elitism here, are not aimed at the same audience that Plague Over England is. The night I saw Plague there was nary a chuckle and a lot of snoring. It was a genuine paying audience. On the press night , I doubt there were many people that paid and I believe that most of them had to be well wishers. Furthermore the theatre itself is intimate and it would make it easier for the audience reaction to be infectuous. Why not wander by the Duchess on a rainy weeknight now that the show is open and gage what a real audience makes of this leaden evening?
No two shows are aimed at the same audience. Either you're using an elitist argument by differentiating between musical entertainment and straight drama (as it were), or you're doing a Morrison and simply discounting examples that are inconvenient to your argument, or both :-)
Look at the presumptions you're making: "I doubt... I believe... had to be... would make it...". And on that edifice of assumption you're claiming priority for an opinion over those of folk whose job it is to take account of all those factors and who have immense experience of doing so.
As for why I don't wander by the Duchess again, (a) I'm in the business of gauging plays on the basis of rather more than the noise audible from the street outside, and (b) why don't you read my FT review and discover what I thought of it in the first place? :-)
"No two shows are aimed at the same audience" I think DD & Rock you are , I think Sound of Music & Oliver are, and I believe plays such as the current productions of Enjoy and Three Days of Rain are. You may disagree with me but I bet if we look at the post codes and demographics of those attractions a lot of similarities would pop up. Sorry I said "I bet" that would fall into the "I believe" "I doubt" qualifying category rather than a declamatory "It is" which you "as one of those folks whose job it is to take account of all those factors and have immense experience in doing so". Just because you have a job "doing so" hardly means that your opinion or experience is greater than mine. The hard fact is that thanks to the blogsphere , a more democratic wave of dramatic criticism is upon us, usually from people who have had to pay for their tickets and so they aren't as cavalier or as easy with their praise. And surely among those amateurs there will be a few who are University graduates, passionate theatregoers who are well read and know how to analyze a play and a performance. You and I both know that there are drama critics now who have been given the assignment from their news desks because they were "in the room" or had to be in town during the week anyway.
And as for wandering by the Duchess - I suggest you wander IN to the theatre and watch Plague with a paying audience - don't stand outside to hear how they respond , I don't think the sound of slumber can carry that far. :)
Wander around London Town...see if you can find any statues in memory and celebration of a critic. This in-fighting is becoming tiresome...you have no way of sinking a production or making a production, you just comment on it, the days of the powerful critic are over and have been for a while so play your little games down at the Duchess and let commerce deal with credit crunch and trying to get an audience into the theatre.
Well, there's the statue of Samuel Johnson at St Clement Dane's, the statue of Coleridge being petitioned for in Highgate, Maggie Hambling's idiosyncratic Oscar Wilde memorial behind St Martin's-in-the-Field, the statue of Bernard Shaw shamefully only in Niagara-on-the-Lake (what?, you didn't say in commemoration of their criticism, just of critics)... but you could try in vain looking for any statue anywhere to anyone (other than Sibelius, who coined it) that ever crassly repeated that tired old falsehood... And I don't know why you think it's in-fighting, all the attacks have been coming from outside, or are we not allowed to defend ourselves? Nor do critics either presume to grand power nor miss it; and as for "little games", how much smaller-ad-infinitum does it get with folk commenting on our comments...?
I was at Plague Over England last night. I was amused that Ma Jongh could write a line like "what use is a critic who sleeps?"
Otherwise I felt that this was more of a plague over the West End than over England. Frankly, I was appalled at just how shockingly bad the whole sorry mess was. I felt embarrassed and ashamed to be sitting in a West end theatre watching and wondering how such a badly written, abysmally directed and incompetently acted play could have,not only made it beyond a pub theatre, but have been greeted by your critical brethren with such ill deserved praise.
Such butt-clenching banality and all round rank amateurishness is a slur, not only to the memory of Sir John, but to the poor dilapidated hole in the ground that is the Duchess Theatre. To think that this is where I saw Peggy Ashcroft in The Deep Blue Sea, Donald Wolfit in John Gabriel Borkman, Sybil Thorndike in Return Ticket, Flora Robson in The Old Ladies, Glenda Jackson & John Wood in Collaborators. Where Alan Bates and Donald Pleasence appeared in The Caretaker.
The supporting cast were all on the same level of bad weekly rep in the days gone and best forgotten. Michael Feast,with a passing facial resemblance to Gielgud, was otherwise a grotesque caricature that should make Sir John,and anyone who knew him or saw him, turn in their graves. Worst of all was Celia Imrie, giving not one but two cringe making performances which she could scarcely be bothered to make audible.
In short, a dim, depressing, disastrous evening which tarnishes the reputation of the British Theatre.
Ooer.