Jolly Good Show Boating Weather
The Eton boating song comes to mind in this glorious Bank Holiday weekend and not just because of the sunshine. We have an Old Etonian prime minister in waiting, an Old Etonian Mayor of London — and suddenly a whole bunch of Old Etonian theatre critics.
What’s going on? Time for a new class war, methinks: very few post-war theatre critics went to public school, let alone Eton — Tynan, Brien, Wardle, the top guys, certainly didn’t — and it’s partly because the new post-war theatre was always adversarial to the status quo, in conflict with the Establishment, libertarian and intellectually radical.
So were the critics, on the whole, or the most interesting ones. Theatre was about changing the world, not sucking up to it.
These days, everyone seems to be on the same side, and everyone’s generally disapproving of excess and formal experimentalism in the theatre. Hence the slew of sniffy, closed ranks reviews for the two most interesting shows in town, Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition at the Young Vic and Wallace Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colours at the Royal Court.
You certainly know where critics are “at” these days, but you don’t really know where they’re coming from, or why. Theatre has to be about everyday norms of humanity and family values, or it stinks, apparently. ‘Twas never thus.
The new chap at the Standard, Henry Hitchings (not to be confused with Henry Higgins or Peter and Christopher Hitchens, none of whom went to Eton), a tubbier version of Toby Young (tubby, or not tubby, that’s the critical question these days) was made to feel at home in the Sunday Times today by another OE, Sam Leith.
As it happens, both Hitchings and Leith wrote well about Wallace Shawn. In fact, both write very well period. And both are highly intelligent, which does make a change in the critical ranks.
What we don’t know yet is whether there’s a game plan, a manifesto, a career in the offing. Or is this just, as is more usually the case nowadays, another instance of theatre providing a convenient outlet for a talented columnist with views on everything.
And a case of jobs for the old boys. We’ve just all about got used to the fact that Robert Gore-Langton was a decent sort of chap despite going to Eton, and the quondam Independent on Sunday’s Old Etonian Robert (Bobby baby) Butler is still a familiar and well informed first-nighter.
I tend to agree with the recently expressed opinion that the days of the professional theatre critic are numbered anyway. I was fortunate to hold down staff positions on three national newspapers for a total of twenty-three years, but staff contracts on arts pages are a thing of the past, as is the idea of an arts editor who exercises a sense of duty towards the art forms and sees it as part of his or her job to plan continuity and development of critical careers and coverage.
Hitchings has come from nowhere but shows a few signs of wanting to go somewhere, but we won’t know if he’s a theatre critic in the old sense at least for a couple of years yet, while if we’re going to have part-time visitors to the stalls let’s hope they’re all going to be as good as Sam Leith (who seems, incidentally, to be writing columns already in most newspapers anyway).
Obviously going to Eton was no handicap in their by-line bagging (the new editor of the Standard, Geordie Greig, is an Old Etonian chum of Hitchings) even if, for the moment, I’d feel in safer hands reading Dominic Cavendish of the Telegraph.
Cavendish is about to become the second critic (and the first second-string critic) with a play in the West End this year (if you accept the definition of Trafalgar Studios as West End, which I don’t, really), when his George Orwell anthology, highly rated by a few well-disposed colleagues at the Edinburgh Festival fringe last year, opens in two weeks.
George Orwell? Bugger me, another Old Etonian. I tell you, Carruthers, these blighters are everywhere, and we need a damned good burst of Brechtian agitprop, with a full complement of clog dancers and spoon players, to flush ‘em out into the open.