Young at heart
“If in doubt, blame the critics”. It’s a good old showbiz maxim. But it’s somewhat surprising to see it lately pursued by Nicholas Hytner, the much-acclaimed director of the National Theatre. His comment that too many critics were “dead white males” who displayed a misogynist attitude to women directors provoked a tremendous storm; and, although I took Nick’s views with a pinch of salt, I found the Guardian arts website filled with an alarming number of blogs demanding my head on a platter.
Over the years, I’ve got used to outraged commercial producers attacking the critics. Sometimes it isn’t even producers but PRs. There was an hilarious example after a flop musical called Bernadette, when the show’s publicist blamed our negative reviews on our sexual preferences and the fact many of us were accompanied by “young boys”. The reality was that many critics took their offspring to the first night simply because their wives refused to go! My favourite story came after the first night of the original Andrew Lloyd Webber-Alan Ayckbourn musical Jeeves, when the sainted Eric Thompson, who directed it, was asked on TV if the critics killed the show. “No,” said Thompson with refreshing honesty. “The show killed the show.”
That is what theatre people rarely take into account: that it may be the product rather than the critic that is flawed. The National’s A Matter of Life and Death, which prompted Nick’s diatribe, is a case in point. I, personally, admired the verve and inventiveness of Emma Rice’s staging: the swinging bed, the bicycling angels, the table-tennis match recreated through ping-pong balls on poles were all brilliant. But I also felt the set-pieces sometimes clogged the narrative. As a critic, wasn’t it my job to say so? If that was an example of misogyny, I’ll eat my hat.
But the sensitive issue on which Nick touched was that of age. Is the critical profession dominated by a lot of old greybeards who should be put out to grass? I am 67, the Times’ Benedict Nightingale is 68, and a number of our colleagues are in their fifties. Does that disqualify us from acting as aisle-squatters? It’s for other people to judge. I’d only say that experience can sometimes be a useful tool when putting a new play or classical revival in context. The young critic, of whom I’m happy to say there are plenty, offers a freshness of vision. An older critic is perhaps more easily able to set a new play by Tom Stoppard (70 in July) or Caryl Churchill (69 in September) against the background of their lifetime’s achievements.
In the end, however, I hate all this talk about age. Only one thing matters in dramatists, directors, actors and critics: a limitless curiosity and youthfulness of spirit. If I’ve noticed anything about theatre, it’s that it has an extraordinary rejuvenating capacity. When I meet Peter Brook, Michael Frayn, Judi Dench, or any one of a dozen others I could name, I’m struck by their ceaseless intellectual and spiritual vitality.
Making theatre keeps people young. I’d like to think that writing about it has a similar tonic effect. Maybe there is something about the delirious game of theatre that turns us all into Peter Pans. But, whatever the answer, I think critics should be judged not by their birth certificates but by their insatiable hunger for theatre. Only when they lose that should they be shunted off into what Barry Humphries once called “a maximum-security retirement-home”.
