Squaring the (critical) circle….

I have many, many more members of the circle, of course, than awards categories - there are only nine, though yesterday we had ten awards to present in all since there was a tie for Best Director - so I can’t invite everyone that I would like to (or who thinks they are entitled) to do so. I have the further challenge of reconciling the votes they have actually cast to the awards themselves, since I can naturally only ask critics to present to winners that they have themselves nominated.

And then, once the administration is done, I also have the job of keeping things moving on the day - acting as a welcoming committee on the door, then doing all the introductions, thank you’s (I feel a bit like a Cirque du Soleil narrator at the beginning with all the sponsorship plugs) and links onstage, too. I have tried to insist that critics confine themselves to a maximum of a two-minute speech, but without an orchestral swell to drown them out if they over-run, I can’t stop them.

There’s no stopping the irrepressible Arthur Smith, either, who is our annual warm-up man - not even the presence of a bunch of kids from the RSC’s production of Matilda yesterday curbed his flow of off-colour jokes. But then they’re in Matilda, easily one of the most sophisticated and layered of all children’s musicals that operates on two levels at once, as Matt Wolf presenting it the award for Best Musical even more eloquently put it, and added it was the best British musical he had ever reviewed in over 27 years of writing about the London theatre.

And that’s the great thing about the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards: they come from a place and from people who have a frame of reference, a long view of keeping rigorous tabs on the comings and goings of the British stage; but who do it, as Michael Grandage acknowledged when he picked up his own gong, from a place of passion, not (for the most part) cynicism. Michael generously thanked the critics for their long-term support of his work across the last fifteen years, during which time he has run both Sheffield’s Crucible and the Donmar Warehouse (at one point, both simultaneously).

Grandage won the award for Best Director for his Donmar production of King Lear, sharing it jointly with Thea Sharrock for the National Theatre production of After the Dance. She duly became the first woman director ever to receive a Critics’ Circle Award in this category; and it reminds me of something Clint Dyer once said to me when he became the first black British director ever to have a musical on in the West End when he directed The Big Life: “The wonderful thing about being black in this country is that you have an amazing opportunity to be the first at a lot of things!”

Women, too, clearly still have places to go to be first at - Thea (or Josie Rourke or Marianne Elliott or Katie Mitchell) all have a shot at being the first female artistic director of the National Theatre after Hytner departs. At least, however, amongst the critical ranks there is now a much fairer distribution between the sexes - as well as three first-string Sunday critics in Susannah Clapp, Georgina Brown and Kate Bassett on the Observer, Mail on Sunday and Independent on Sunday respectively, we now also have daily first-string critics, too, in Libby Purves on The Times and Sarah Hemming (jointly sharing the lead critic job with Ian Shuttleworth) on the FT, as well as Claire Allfree on Metro and Caroline McGinn, theatre editor of Time Out, plus a series of second strings, including Lyn Gardner and Fiona Mountford, plus Kate Kellaway standing in on The Observer and Sam Marlowe contributing to The Times and others.

We can’t fix the world overnight (and the critical community still lacks a black or Asian voice), but at least the Critics’ Circle Awards — voted for independently from a secret ballot of the entire membership of the drama section of the Critics’ Circle, not as a result of the kind of discussions and horse-trading that mark out other ceremonies - offers a chance to be reflect the changing world of British theatre, both amongst its practitioners and commentators.

And although we are looking at dark times ahead with arts funding now under serious threat, as with every other area of public life thanks to the age of austerity being implemented by the new coalition government, yesterday, at least, everyone was a winner, and even the critics are friends of the industry, not adversaries.

In the first edition of Stephen Sondheim’s newly published collected lyrics “Finishing the Hat”, he writes about the critical press he has suffered over the years, including on one occasion, from John Lahr who wrote an essay saying that Sondheim represented the death of the American musical and citing Sweeney Todd in evidence. As Sondheim says, “This assessment would have been his right to make had he seen the show, but he hadn’t. He had merely read an early rehearsal script”.

Sondheim wrote to Lahr, telling him that although it was his privilege to give a show both barrels of his contempt, he thought he ought to see it first. Lahr replied, with a note that was, in Sondheim’s words, “succinct, not to say dismissive of such a trivial objection. ‘I guess you’re right,’ he replied.”

Sondheim goes on to say, “That cured me. I rarely read critics anymore,” but he adds, “When I look back at the ones I’ve encountered over the years, however, I have the dismaying thought that if, as the saying goes, a man is best measured by the size of his enemies, I’m in a lot of trouble.”

Yesterday, however, the critics were gathered as friends of the profession; though as my colleague Paul Taylor asked, “I wonder if any of the practitioners receiving gongs on Tuesday will find themselves just a little worried by the size of their friends.”