Critics review a century of fear and loathing from the stage

The Times, 6/4/2013
By Simon Tait
“I wish I were anything rather than an actor”, wrote the 19th century actor William Macready, “except a critic: let me be unhappy rather than vile”.

The relationship between the reviewer and the reviewed has always been, at best, tetchy, and the memoirs of artists and writers are peppered with loathing. “If I’d have listened to the critics,” Chekhov observed, “I’d have died drunk in the gutter”.

This duelling has gone on down the centuries without benefit of referee. Responses from artists to adverse reviews was always more vituperative than the critics’ appraisals, and with most critics being freelance and working to contract, they seldom have an editor who can intervene on their behalf.

So on April 11th a hundred years ago The Critics’ Circle was created to give them a status when they had to deal with those they wished to review. Membership was, and is, by invitation so that it could be seen to represent an elite. It was inaugurated at the Institute of Journalists in Tudor Street off Fleet Street, with the drama critic William Archer (who, as it happened, was also a playwright who championed the work of Ibsen, whose work he translated for the British stage, and led the battle against censorship after the banning of Granville Barker’s Waste in 1907).

The members, and there were 80 after a year, 400 today, were principally theatre critics, but music critics were welcome from the outset, as were, for a while, food critics (the first was a Lieutenant Colonel Newnham Davies, ex-The Buffs). Women were invited to join in 1916, to the single objection of Col Davies and two years before they had the vote. Art critics were asked to join in 1919, but it was almost 80 years before they formed their own section (of which there are now five, for drama, dance, music, film and visual art and architecture).

The Circle insisted – and still does – on professional propriety, deviation from which caused one of its more resounding internal upheavals. In 1942 James Agate, the Sunday Times drama critic and one of the few reviewers to achieve celebrity status in his own right, wrote a review of L’Enfant Prodigue starring the 18-year-old Alan Badel at the Mercury in Notting Hill, without actually having seen it. The theatre manager complained to the editor who took no action, but the Circle deplored it. Agate, a member since 1923 and president in 1938, promptly resigned: “I decline further association with a Circle sound in its principles but perversely and persistently wrong headed in it application of them”. It transpired that he had also not paid his subs for the previous year.

There were occasional lulls in the confrontation. For a 1925 garden party in aid of the Actors’ Orphanage, Saturday Review drama critic Ivor Brown wrote a play, The Divill a Vegetarian or Smithfield Preserved with a cast of 12, all Circle members, which was reviewed in the following day’s papers, mostly generously, by Seymour Hicks, George Grossmith, Evelyn Laye, Madge Titheradge, Gertrude Elliott and Lady Diana Cooper.

Guests at the Critics’ Circle annual dinner have included Bob Hope, J M Barrie, Sybil Thorndike, Michael Redgrave and Yehudi Menuhin, and Peter Sellers sent a rambling letter on the morning of the event to say he would not be there. Often they have seized the opportunity to take a swing.

John Wayne said it was like being asked to dinner by the Borgias, and the Broadway star Mary Martin, who didn’t want to make a speech but offered to sing instead, was told by the Hon Gen Sec that this would be a regrettable departure from custom, and she remained silent. In 1952 Christopher Fry spoke of “the patter of tiny critics” who “know what they like and will never know anything more”.

The relationship can sometimes develop into open warfare, as when the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer fell foul of Judi Dench after his review of her in Madame du Sade in 2009 in which she described her as appearing in “formidable old boot mode. Frankly, this imperious turn is becoming a bit of a bore…” Dame Judi replied: “I’ve always rather admired you but now realise you’re an absolute shit”.

Steven Berkoff even confronted the Evening Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh in a pub after an unflattering review and threatened to kill him, a threat he dismissed as a joke but which De Jongh certainly took seriously. In 1966 John Osborne wrote to The Times’s Benedict Nightingale to inform him of the formation of the British Playwrights’ Mafia, and telling him “Safer for your health to stay clear of downtown Chichester”.

But then, there is something of the night about critics. “Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in daytime?” P G Wodehouse mused. “Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good”.