Jez Butterworth, accepting the best play prize at the Critics Circle Theatre Awards for Jerusalem, was relieved to discover that we had a circle in the first place.

Now he envisaged us sitting there, writing all our reviews together, and not having to go off separately to live with our mums.

This moment of revelation was as piercing as some of Arthur Smith’s jokes, notably the one about the doctor telling the man with a lettuce stuck in his fundament that it was only the tip of the iceberg.
 
And it made up for one or two of the more embarrassing moments, such as a bossy American guest’s heckling of the chief sponsor when the poor man, confined to a wheelchair, was failing to speak into the microphone.

Or when Benedict Nightingale took to the stage, having announced his retirement at the end of May, and one or two of his colleagues leapt to their feet in a standing ovation that nobody else felt like joining in.

One critic, David Benedict, even managed to dispense a rather grand actor manque’s masterclass in calling sleepy head Tom Sturridge to the stage as most promising newcomer in Punk Rock. Wow, we thought, why isn’t old Benedict a director, why is he slumming with us lot?
 
Michael Billington applauded the most promising playwright, Alia Bano for Shades, for disposing of our preconceptions about Muslims, which of course assumed that we had any in the first place.

And Uncle Ben revealed, astonishingly, that his deadline for copy on The Times was 10.20pm these days, and he had a fine collection of parking tickets to prove it, though the logical connection between these two statements wasn’t apparent.

Uncle Ben said that the job of a critic  is celebration, which is one way of putting it, and we were gathered here to celebrate the genius of best actor Mark Rylance as Johnny Byron in Jerusalem.

Rylance then demonstarted his genius by making an incomprehensible but very moving speech about landing a large fish, which was almost, though not quite, in the Eric Cantona class of being pursued at sea by a shoal of sardines.

Uncle Ben has had lunch with Libby Purves, his successor as chief critic on The Times, and reports that she’s keen to find out about the fringe and review things in Manchester, so she’s obviously ideally qualified for the job.

Any further doubts about her suitability were dispelled by Arthur Smith, who said that Libby had spent years dealing drugs in the corridors of Radio Four and giving blow jobs to John Humphrys when he’d finished presenting the Today programme.

This went some way to placating the quarrel of critics who had been much disturbed two days earlier by an article in the Daily Telegraph by the circle chairman saying he didn’t like going to first nights anymore.

It would be hard to imagine a greater heroism than persisting in a job you disliked to this extent.

More seriously, as critics allow managements to  negate their importance and function even further by seeming to comply in the inappropriate and eviscerating Broadway system of reviewing previews, we may in future years look back on these awards ceremonies as the last public evidence of a dinosaur occupation.

That said, the occasion yesterday in the Prince of Wales was so enjoyable that Jude Law (best Shakespearean performance as Hamlet) stayed schmoozing at the bar till nearly tea-time.

Rachel Weisz was utterly charming and beautiful when collecting her best actress gong for Streetcar from Fiona Mountford, and Rupert Goold (best director for Enron) wisely remarked on the unreliability of such awards when considering the bum’s rush afforded by members of the circle’s music section to his superb ENO production of Turandot.

Chris Oram, best designer for Red at the Donmar, tells me he’s designing a Beatles show at the Glasgow Citizens focussing on Stuart Sutcliffe, and taking up the story where the fine new film, Nowhere Boy, ends, with the boys in Hamburg.

This sounds like something the producers of Spring Awakening — thankfully named best musical, phew — might be interested in. And Susannah Clapp, describing Oram’s set, did this so well you could re-imagine the paint dripping down the walls.

This is what makes these awards so unique. They are given by people who have actually seen the show and know how to express why the award has been given. So perhaps critics do have a function after all. All the speeches yesterday indeed suggested this was the case. 
 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 9:55 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.