the times | Saturday June 11 2022 2GM 3
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Rowan Atkinson has admitted that he
rarely finds his own work amusing and
often struggles with feelings of
“perfectionism”.
In an interview with The Times, the
comedian behind the characters of
Blackadder and Mr Bean described
perfectionism as a “kind of disease”.
“Just thinking that whatever you’re
doing, you could do better, that’s the
problem. You think it was OK but surely
there’s something better there some-
where? It’s the perfectionist feeling, I
suppose,” he said. “And perfectionism is
all very well but it is a kind of disease.”
He said that when reviewing his own
Kieran Gair, Andrew Billen
Steven Berkoff in 2015’s Dinner with Saddam, which was savaged. Now Anthony Horowitz has returned the favour, killing off a Sunday Times critic in his latest bookCritic makes a novel murder victim
Anthony Horowitz has
found a way to satisfy
his seven-year fury over
a poor theatre review,
writes David Sanderson
DONALD COOPER/PHOTOSTAGEIn the horror-comedy Theatre of
Blood, an old thesp takes murderous
revenge on the critics who
torpedoed his career. Many a
West End impresario may nurture
such fantasies. “Why do we give
critics free tickets?” they wail. The
answer is not just publicity or
quality control. Nor, given arts
subsidies, is it simply down to
transparency. It is to do with their
desire for validation. You never hear
them complain about a five-star
rave, do you?
Quentin Letts is a theatre critic for
The Sunday Timesof all trades). And that, as we know,
was the end of William Shakespeare.
Horowitz was upset that his 2015
play Dinner With Saddam took a
drubbing. From what I recall, that
show was ho-hum, though not a
total stinker. Maybe Horowitz is just
trying to draw attention to himself
(fair enough), or is misdirecting his
rage. Bad reviews are a symptom of
failure, not its cause. Today’s critics
are, anyway, pretty tame. Some are
blatant (and possibly corrupt)
cheerleaders for iffy productions.
Few of us give the lavatory chain a
hard yank these days.Revenge, it appears, is a dish best served
on the pages of a detective novel. In his
forthcoming work, Anthony Horowitz
has taken a metaphysical approach to
revenge for a critical mauling by killing
the Sunday Times theatre critic.
Horowitz, the acclaimed creator of
several adult and children’s fiction
series, has confessed that he goes into a
“dark place” whenever his work is criti-
cised. “Even one review will really,
really upset me,” he said at a recent talk.
“It can last years.”
He has spoken in the past of his dev-
astation about reviews for his 2015 play,
Dinner with Saddam, which was given
two stars by the Times critic Ann Trene-
man. She called it “a very funny half-a-
play [that] all went wrong just before
dinner was served”.
In 2017 Horowitz described the
theatre world as brutal and horrible,
saying that theatre critics had the
“power of getting you on the first night”.
He told the Edinburgh International
Book Festival: “When they come in and
are horrible about somebody’s work,
that just makes me angry.”
Now, through his new Detective
Hawthorne novel — which features an
author called Anthony Horowitz — the
critic finally gets her comeuppance.
A publishing catalogue entry on The
Twist of a Knife, which is released in
August, describes how the fic-
tional Horowitz’s new play
at the “famous Vaudeville
Theatre in Shoreditch...
has not received universal
acclaim”.
“In particular, Sunday
Times critic Harriet Throsby
gives it a savage re-
view, focusing par-
ticularly on the
writing. The next
day Throsby is
stabbed in the
heart with an
ornamental dag-
ger, which... be-
longs to Antho-
ny, and which
has his finger-
prints all over it.”
Horowitz is then ar-
rested on suspicion
of murder.
There have al-
ways been tensions
between critics and
creators, but in recent
years intolerance towards re-
viewers has increased, with
social media allowing people to
defend their favourite artists,
sometimes abusively.
In guidance issued last year,
Equity, the actors’ union,
advised critics to consider
their relative privilege when
critiquing a performance, and
to consider whether they were best
placed to interpret a story. “Trueobjectivity does not exist,” it said, so “re-
views will always be influenced by their
own lived experience”.
Last month Regent’s Park Open Air
Theatre in London threatened to stop
inviting critics to performances unless
they commented with “respect and
sensitivity”.
Horowitz told the Hay Festival last
month that The Twist of a Knife was
about how writers felt when their work
was not appreciated.“Being attacked bycritics always hurts,” he said. “I go into
a dark place when that happens. Even
one review will really, really upset me. It
can last years. I can actually remember
reviews — the first review I got for
[Bond novel] Forever and a Day was a
stinker... the worst review I ever had.”
Horowitz said his son had attempted
to hide that review from him, and that
in another case “the editor of the paper
rang me the day before and said, ‘Don’t
buy the paper’. But one of the reasonswhy I wrote a third novel was to say, ‘Go
to hell... I’m just going to keep going
anyway’. You can’t let criticism change
your mind about what you’ve done.
You’ve got to believe in [it].”
Horowitz, 67, once said he would use
a pseudonym if he wrote another play,
though it remains to be seen if he will
risk it. An earlier effort, Mindgame, also
divided the critics, he said — there
were “those who disliked it and those
who hated it”.V
iolent urges towards
drama critics are not
unknown. Steven Berkoff,
irked by a bad review
of his Hamlet, threatened
to kill The Guardian’s
Nicholas de Jongh. Sylvia
Miles emptied a plate of food
over New York magazine’s
John Simon. More shocking
still, it was steak tartare.Don’t blame the reviewers — we only point out the flaws
In 1963, during a live episode of
BBC TV’s That Was the Week That
Wa s, a man punched the critic
Bernard Levin. The assailant was
the husband of the actress Agnes
Bernelle, whose show at the
Duchess Theatre Levin had
truncheoned in the Daily Mail.
Anthony Horowitz’s killing-off of a
critic is (so far) only fiction, but is
part of a tradition of hostilities
dating to at least the 16th century,
when Shakespeare had to endure
the barbs of Robert Greene. Greene
called him an “upstart crow” and
“absolute Johannes factotum” (JackQuentin Letts
Comment
Atkinson led a coalition of actors and
writers opposing a bill to make incite-
ment to religious hatred illegal under
Tony Blair’s government.
He said: “There’s been manifestly a
lot of successful lobbying from religious
groups to make a religion a protected
characteristic akin to race or gender. I
don’t think religion is a characteristic.
It’s an allegiance. It’s a choice.
“It’s just this perennial problem that
comedy is bound to have in the atmos-
phere that we have now, which is to be
kind. The culture is to be nice to people,
which sounds great... but in practice,
every joke has a victim. That’s what a
joke is.”
Interview, Saturday Review, pages 4-Perfectionism is a disease, says Atkinson
work “I rarely laugh, physically, out
loud at anything... I can just see when
it works.”
Atkinson, 67, who will star in the new
Netflix comedy Man vs Bee, revealed
that the pressure to perform as a
comedian gets worse with age.
“But the real stress is not physical
stress; it’s the mental stress,” he said.
“That I do find hard when shooting. I
find it very hard. I find the writing bit is
fun. We had our first script meeting just
over three years ago for this [Man vs
Bee] and started shooting a year ago.
And I’m always involved a lot in the
post-production and all that stuff.
“It’s the meat in the sandwich that I
don’t like. The bits of bread are fine.”Costa closes book on awards
The Costa Book Awards are to end after
50 years, organisers have announced.
The annual literary event, which
recognises English-language books by
writers in Britain and Ireland, was
established in 1971 under the name the
Whitbread Book Awards.
Winners have included Sally Rooney,
Kate Atkinson, Hilary Mantel and
William Boyd. Hannah Lowe, a former
London teacher, was named overall
winner at the 2021 ceremony, which
was held in February this year and was
the awards’ last.
A statement from the organisers said:
“After 50 years of celebrating some of
the most enjoyable books written by
hugely talented authors from acrossthe UK and Ireland, Costa Coffee has
taken the difficult decision to end the
Costa Book Awards.”
Organisers said that they were
“incredibly proud to have played a part
in supporting some of the bestselling
authors of the last 50 years as well as
trailblazing diverse and fresh voices”.
The Costa Book Awards tended to
celebrate works that had literary merit
while also being enjoyable for the
general public to read.
They were generally separated into
six categories: biography, children’s
books, first novel, novel, poetry and
short story, and the winner of each
genre competed for the top prize, Costa
Book of the Year.