Theatre companies woo them in the hope of positive publicity. Actors either hate them or ignore them. The popular view of the critic is of the failed something-or-other else (writer, actor, director), who resorts to criticising people who are more successful and skilled in their chosen profession than they are. If you can’t do it, criticise those who can.
In the course of my pilgrimage into theatre history I’ve come to revise my own view of critics. To the theatre historian they are a crucial part of the jigsaw of the plays and players that make up our theatre heritage. I have also discovered there are critics of real stature; men (usually) with not just a deep knowledge of but a real love of theatre; writers with the skill, the knowledge and the sensitivity to bring something that happened centuries ago to vivid life, the nearest any of us can get to the real event.
Theatre is above all a transitory thing. Until the recent introduction of NT Live[1], and its equivalents here in the UK and elsewhere, if you weren’t there to witness a production and a performance the only people you could rely on to tell you about it were the critics. You can watch an old film and form your own opinion, you can even watch some old television programmes. But if you never saw Olivier on stage you can have no idea what he was really like.
The same obviously goes for all of them over the centuries: Richard Burbage, Thomas Betterton, David Garrick, Sarah Siddons etc etc. Before the professional critic appeared on the scene in the early nineteenth century all we have to go on are passing comments from acquaintances or people who happened to witness the great performances, some of whom had personal axes to grind. Hacks and wits sometimes wrote quaint stories about the theatre: Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in the guise of “the spectator” wrote about it for a publication they founded called, interestingly, The Guardian. [No relation that I can find.] But real critics like William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt did not appear until the early 1800s.
I am currently working my way through a book of Kenneth Tynan’s theatre reviews (Kenneth Tynan, Theatre Writings). I never used to have time for Tynan, to me he represented the worst kind of critic: opinionated, someone who’d do anything for the bon mot or the catty remark; whose main ambition was to be witty rather than enlightening, if necessary at the expense of actors or, in his case in particular, actresses.
I haven’t really changed those views as I work through his writings, but I have gained a new and massive respect for him. Yes he was catty, he loved being catty, and he was prejudiced. Laurence Olivier could (virtually) do no wrong but Vivien Leigh could do no right. He adored American musicals and bemoaned the state of the kind of English theatre set in a (fictional) place called ‘Loamshire’, where everyone was elegant and oblique and nothing much happened. He had little time for plays that did not tackle contemporary themes, what he called social realism. He was ambivalent about Beckett and loved Arnold Wesker who, in his view, was one of the few writers who could write about social reality within the working classes with insight and empathy.
But goodness me, he did know his stuff. He was writing in the 1950s, a seminal time in British theatre, the time of Look Back in Anger and Waiting for Godot and the new Method acting. His description of a production of Anne Frank’s Diaries that he attended in Berlin, and in particular the reaction of the shell-shocked audience, had me in tears.
So yes, he did have his likes and dislikes, but they were obvious. If one thinks, as I used to do, that critics should be dispassionate about everything but about actors in particular, Tynan showed me how impossible this is. A critic is a human being. All human beings have prejudices: there are actors we take a dislike to not because of a lack of talent but simply because we don’t like them. If a critic is too dispassionate he is not likely to be able to become so engaged in a production that he can engage his readers accordingly.
That does not excuse the critic who makes gratuitously personal remarks about an actor’s physical appearance. But for the theatre historian, if I can call myself that, I have to say thank you Kenneth Tynan for bringing the mid-twentieth century theatre to life for me. I’m just glad I was never caught on the sharp end of your pen.
Sources:
Kenneth Tynan, Kenneth Tynan’s Writings, Nick Hern Books, 2007
https://www.critical-stages.org/1/the-history-of-criticism-english/ John Elsom
[1] The live recording of a performance of a play at the National Theatre or the West End, which is transmitted live on the same night around the world, and on occasion repeated at a later date
Thank you Simon! Yes, there's nothing wrong with prejudices - we all have them - so long as they're out there in the open. In my view anyway. x
Another great article, Patsy! Wisdom, right there, in appreciating a ‘critic’ is only ever just another human sharing their personal view.