Misquoting The Critics
I see that misquoting the critics on hoardings and publicity material could become illegal when a new EU directive comes into force later this year. This is really to do with “sharp” practices in all forms of marketing, but some critics seem to rejoice in the prospect of having their pearls of wisdom unmolested by ruthless managements seeking to fill up their billboards with rave notices. I can’t get very excited about this. It’s not as if the deathless prose of a jobbing critic is worth fighting over, and standing on too much dignity makes you sound as if you’ve mistaken yourself for Hazlitt. And anyway, all critics, myself included, spend most of their lives misrepresenting (in the view of the artists) original theatre work in print; why should the critics feel themselves beyond such misrepresentation?
Theatre owners and managers only want one thing from critics: quotable rave reviews. The critic has a higher mission, one which discusses an art form for the benefit of interested readers and prospective customers. Hence the mutual misunderstanding on this matter. I always used to admire the reviews of Irving Wardle in The Times which were written in such a way that you could not easily extract quotes — favourable or unfavourable– from them. My first boss and mentor on the Financial Times, B A “Freddie” Young, was the most benign of critics and sought to find good in all shows, even the worst. But he rather drew the line at a farce called No Sex Please, We’re British. Listing its faults in the kindliest way possible, he concluded sadly that he was compelled to report that an undiscerning minority in the audience was rolling in the aisles. Guess what was on the posters for the next few years? “The audience was rolling in the aisles.” Freddie never complained about this, but once told me that the lesson to be drawn was not to use flabby, meaningless phrases in writing reviews. Some critics write for the hoardings, of course. And one or two even used to go round the West End counting up the times they had been quoted. Such is vanity. “This one will run and run” used to be almost the catchphrase of Fergus Cashin in the old days. But I don’t recall reading “I laughed till my sides ached” in any of Bernard Shaw’s reviews, or “Ideal entertainment for all the family” in the collected works of Kenneth Tynan.