Critical Sneak Unmasked
Theatre critics can stop puzzling over the furtive, guilty glances shot in their direction at first nights by the usually jovial Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail. He’s been revealed by my fellow blogger Madame Arcati as the man behind the anonymous theatre news items in Private Eye.
It seems rather a grubby way of earning a few extra quid, but I dare say you can never take the diarist out of a thorough going hack, any more than you can vice versa. And with a name like Letts, who wouldn’t spend his time filling in blank diary pages?
The owlish sneak spent most of the Carmen Jones interval chatting with Veronica Wadley, the Evening Standard editor who is in grave danger of becoming an inveterate first-nighter. Let’s hope she had a jolly good laugh at Master Letts’s peevish skewering of her irritable theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh in the latest Eye. De Jongh’s “crime” was to stretch his legs during the technical hiccup at the Joseph first night and inform a security guard (or possibly Bill Kenwright) that he was a “f—ing theatre critic.”
I think Letts should raise his sights and his standards a bit. At least he had the guts to attack Thelma Holt and David Liddiment (dubbed “Sediment”) under his own name in his own column, even if the assaults were as graceless as they were unfunny. It surely behoves even the lesser vermin of the newspaper world to operate openly with the full courage of their lack of convictions.
