One critic notes that another, sitting next to him at the opening of Marlowe’s Dido at the National last night, displayed the fruits of her long night’s labours as a shopping list.

That same critic, Ruth Leon, started zipping her bags and gathering her skirts as Dido expired on the pyre, obviously ignorant of the last scene and not all that bothered about how Marlowe might finish his first and rarely seen play.

The quality of boredom is not strained and however astonishing I find it that a critic would be indifferent to Marlowe, or perhaps this production of him, no doubt others would find it equally astonishing that I didn’t much like Priscilla Queen of the Desert. One man’s meat, etcetera…

But my fellow blogger Mark Shenton is a little out of order to suggest that I eased up on my Whatsonstage review of Priscilla because the company is now housed in a building owned by the Really Useful Group, hosts of Priscilla, too.

Such idle speculation ill becomes a fellow critic, not least one who prides himself to the point of vanity on being chairman of the Critics’ Circle drama section, a post so coveted and respected that he was the sole nomination in the recent election. 

He’s entitled to draw any conclusions he likes, however wrong, but he’s no business pointing fingers or diagnosing motivation. He knows, and so do my editors at Whatsonstage, that if I felt constrained or leant on by proprietorial interests, I’d be out of there before you could say Jason Donovan’s gone a bit dull, hasn’t he? 
 
The Dido production demands and deserves attention not least because there’s not been a major revival in our life time. The Tim Carroll version at the Globe was a severe disappointment, although that fine actor Will Keen played Aeneas. The playground concept was a wacky but misfired response to the fact that the play was first performed by a company of children.

How striking is it, then, that Susan Engel’s withered Juno leaves the stage in tears professing she’s spent the night in bed with the young lad playing Cupid? And what of Marlowe’s astonishing variation on the Virgil source material, that Dido’s sister, Anna, should be a rival for the love of the neighbouring king Iarbas? Or that Virgil’s 800 line description of the Fall of Troy is compressed by Marlowe into a speech of 180 lines of vividly rolling magnificence?

I guess such things pale into insignificance when Morrison’s on your mind, or the wonder of Waitrose beckons on the weekend.

“On a very clear day you can see Marlowe,” said Edith Evans in a rehearsal for Hay Fever. Noel Coward corrected her: “The line, Edith dear, is “On a clear day you can see Marlowe.” On a very clear day you can see Marlowe…and Beaumont…and Fletcher.”

Ruth must have heard her late husband Sheridan Morley recount the anecdote a million times. No need to make a note of that one, either, then. You may indeed be wondering what it is exactly critics write in their notebooks anyway. Usually you write something over the note you’ve just written, so you can’t make head or tail of anything at all by the time you get to the computer.

Mostly, though, you just jot a line or a set detail to jog a memory when you get home. Milton Shulman was once caught by Bernard Levin in a West End theatre scribbling furiously before the show even started. He was amazed to look over the burly Canadian’s left shoulder and see the words “Curtains, red” inscribed confidently on the virgin paper.

You could always rely on old Milt — the only critic who ever successfully summarised the plot of Twelfth Night in a three-sentence paragraph — to tell it how it really is. The rest of us make it up, or write shopping lists.   
 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 11:43 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.