Tomorrow’s theatre and the Death of the Critic
I did a lot of touring and talking yesterday, first at the National Theatre’s slowly emerging new studio on the Cut, next to the Old Vic, and secondly at the ICA whose portals I have not crossed in many a blue moon.
The ICA hosted a panel discussion, with audience participation, convened by the academic and Beckett specialist Ronan McDonald, whose new book The Death of the Critic is published at the end of the month. I hope we get to hear about it because the title rather implies that there may be no-one around to review it.
Ronan proves a jovial cove who wants to know if the internet bloggers are going to render the professional reviewers superfluous to requirements. I tend to think that they won’t, but I enjoy blogs and bloggers if only because my view is reinforced that there is a big difference between the democratic airing of opinion and the job of a critic.
I trotted out my usual views on related topics, and there was a good whiff of sulphurous disagreement in the air from my fellow panellists the Guardian art critic Adrian Searle and the literary academics Rachel Bowlby and John Sutherland.
One thing I forgot to say was that good criticism is really the same as good writing. As Tom Stoppard once said, he’d just as soon read Edmund Wilson on Sophocles as read Sophocles himself.
One sign that theatre critics might have something to write about in a few years’ time is the transformation of the former Young Vic studio into the new National Theatre studio.
Donning hard hat and gumboots after a fine lunch in the National’s Mezzanine restaurant, I cased the joint with a merry band of trustees and advisers to the John Lyon’s Charity which has donated a cool half million towards one of the rooms, an educational studio with a glass wall and sprung floor.
The existing building is being re-built and expanded outwards and upwards over the old car park, with research facilities, desks for writers, an archive space and a really fantatsic new dance studio.
There is also a massage therapy room and a couple of unisex showers, so everyone will be catered for one way or another.
I always like to see theatres or perfomance areas as they evolve. You never quite know how they will turn out, but there is something inherently exciting in the pregnancy period: will it be a cute baby everyone wants to gurgle over, or will it be a fat sullen lump of a thing asleep in its cot. In this case, I bet the former.