Critics know the way but can’t drive the car, said Kenneth Tynan. They’re like eunuchs in a harem, added Brendan Behan for good measure, watching other people having fun every night but incapable of joining in themselves.

Well, the Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh, albeit no spring chicken in his early sixties, is just the latest critic to have written a play, following the example of Bernard Shaw, Irving Wardle, Jeremy Kingston, Sheridan Morley and, er, Toby Young and Lloyd Evans.

The opening of his Plague Over England at the Finborough on Friday night was stormed by colleagues hoping against hope that the thing was half way decent, for we all like Nick just as much as some people in the theatre loathe him.

When I turned up, three of them were even sharing a table with him in the bar area, which seemed to me a little over-cosy, while others gathered at the bar itself, along with Nick’s editor, Veronica Wadley, the acerbic novelist Paul Bailey (deputed to review the play for the Standard), various friends of Nick (and Dorothy) and producers Bill Kenwright, Sonia Friedman and Thelma Holt.

So the tiny auditorium — holding about fifty — had no room for “real people” at all. But the play turns out not only to be more than half way decent, it has something valuable to say about theatre as well as life in the tale of John Gielgud’s temporary disgrace on a charge of gay cottaging in 1953.

“We theatre critics avoid the cold douche of reality,” says one of de Jongh’s fictional characters, a sentiment I see Nick himself echoed in one or two interviews. I don’t think he speaks for all, or indeed even several, of us in this, and anyway his own play contradicts him in its insistence on values of decency and common sense when it comes to considering indecency and the lack of common sense in others.

Tynan used to think theatre was “apart” from life until he realised that it was only a part of it. Perhaps it was an element in Gielgud’s tragedy that he never shared this wisdom and lived forever in a cocoon of  theatrical infantilist escapism.

I once contributed to a festschrift for Gielgud’s eightieth birthday and, when I met him a few years later, I reminded him of our earlier meeting at the publication party. “What a ghastly book,” he exclaimed, “an embarrassment from start to finish.”

In a subsequent correspondence, having realised a certain tactlessness on his part, he wrote, “Indeed it was a ghastly book, except of course for your own very perceptive, witty and much appreciated contribution…”

Ah, praise at last. Critics like to receive it as much as artists. And so far de Jongh is doing very well indeed from his reviews, and rightly so. We are not always so kind to each other.

Some years ago a craven colleague — no names, no pack drill, writes for the Telegraph — wrote me an apologetic note forewarning me of a horrid review he’d written of a book of mine. I didn’t know whether this preemptive strike signalled temerity or spinelessness on his part — a bit of each, I now think — and the horrid review duly appeared.

“I’m sure Mike Leigh deserves a book to be written about him,” it began,”but I don’t know what he’s done to deserve this one.” So it went on — nasty, ill-informed and not even funny.

As the same hack later poured unwarranted praise over my book about Andrew Lloyd Webber — just as good as the Leigh book, written along similar lines and with similar methods of analysis and historical research — I learned the valuable lesson of not believing reviews and trusting no-one for their opinions when it comes to critical estimation.

However, dear old Nick will be trusting everyone who praises him at the moment, and damning to hell fire any of us — myself included, alas — who might enter his or her evaluation with a few little caveats and quibbles.
      

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