Arts
When theatre critics get it painfully wrong
On second
thoughts... Famous
examples of
critically dismissed
shows going on to
be revered include
(clockwise from
main) Fleabag,
Blasted, The
Birthday Party and
Don’t Look Back in
AngerF
rom tonight, 700-odd
people a night will be taking
their seats at Wyndham’s
Theatre to watch Phoebe
Waller-Bridge in a sold-out,
last-hurrah run of Fleabag,
the stage show that eventually made
her a household name. Those lucky
enough to bag tickets will be enjoying
the original monologue in plusher
conditions than in 2013 when her
scabrous solo show first went before
the critics in a musty Edinburgh vault.
It’s a safe bet the reviews will be
adulatory. Back then, while some
offered admiration, only a few hailed a
breakthrough, and none foresaw the
ensuing cultural phenomenon.
Without wishing to name and
shame, a notable handful were – in
hindsight – remarkably grudging. “A
tad contrived,” decided The Times. The
Telegraph thought Fleabag’s narcissism
grew “wearisome”, awarding three
stars, while The Guardian, also handing
out three stars, suggested: “Waller-
Bridge hasn’t produced a flawless piece
of writing.” Least prophetically, The
Independent’s critic advised: “I doubt if
this material will spin into a long-
running radio or TV series.”
Ouch. The failure to recognise fully
the merits of a show presented amid
the hurly-burly of the Edinburgh
Fringe hardly warrants catcalls ages
after the event. Yet in an era when old
reviews are easily found online, critics
are more prone than ever to having
their evaluations raked over.
But doesn’t part of theatre’s value lie
in eliciting a range of subjective
interpretations? Can we really say a
critic got it wrong?
Sometimes the response is so
dismissive in the face of the original
work’s achievement that the exhumed
commentary is fit mainly for mirth.
Take the Financial Times’s 1960 verdict
on The Sound of Music: “As a patriotic
Englishman I devoutly hope my fellow
Englishmen will reject this show
emphatically. It is common and vulgar.”
Some of the broader failures of
criticism for works later acknowledged
as breakthrough achievements are
more instructive. Indeed, negative
notices serve to accentuate the virtues
of the work being castigated.
At the beginning of modern theatre,
the 1891 premiere of Ibsen’s Ghosts in
London was met with what critic
William Archer called a “shriek of ALASTAIR MUIR FOR THE TELEGRAPH; ALAMY; UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL/ARENAPALAs the originally unloved ‘Fleabag’ returns
to the stage, Dominic Cavendish looks at the
times when critics have had to eat humble pie
The implication of there being less
to Pinter’s play than met the eye was a
throwback sentiment to the bafflement
that greeted his London debut The
Birthday Party (1958) – “His characters
speak in non sequiturs, half-gibberish
and lunatic ravings” (The Guardian).
The rise of the “permissive” society
(and the end of stage censorship in
1968) led to a situation where sexually
“immoral” behaviour didn’t trouble the
high-minded reviewer, whereas
insufficient artistic seriousness did.
Kane was blasted, in effect, for seeming
frivolous. A tendency in critics is to
pronounce on what constitutes a fit
subject for a play and they’re often
wrong-footed in their assumptions.
There are two supreme examples in the
pivotal mid-20th century to illustrate
the point – one is Samuel Beckett’s
action-drained Waiting for Godot, the
other John Osborne’s revolutionary
kitchen-sink drama Look Back in Anger.
Of the former, in 1955, the Daily Mail
spoke with irritated bewilderment:
“The play comes to us with a great
reputation among the intelligentsia of
Paris. And so far as I am concerned the
intelligentsia of Paris may have it back
as soon as they wish.” The Evening
Standard was equally quick to refuse
the offer of Osborne’s far more
accessible Royal Court debut a year
later, which ushered in the era of the
young articulate post-war malcontent:
“It aims at being a despairing cry but
achieves only the self-pitying snivel.”
Patronising flippancy – the sense
that a discerning audience’s time is
being wasted – is found in many
dismissive notices from Edward
Bond’s Saved (1965), which simulated
the stoning of a baby (“Revolting if it
wasn’t ridiculous” – The Sun) to Les
Misérables (1985): “Tosh” (City Limits).
Being a species of journalist, the criticis liable to rush a verdict under
pressure of a tight deadline, be tempted
by witty phrasemaking over dully
dutiful appraisal and be hyper-vigilant
against the coercions of publicity hype.
Idiosyncrasy goes with the territory but
if they fail to spot something that
breaks the mould then they’re liable to
become the laughing-stock of history.
For all the countless decent reviews
that Scott wrote, he’s doomed to be
known as the man who got Ghosts
wrong. And it may be, as Waller-
Bridge’s career progresses in leaps and
bounds, that those who slighted her at
the outset will have to wriggle
uncomfortably for a considerable time.
Otherwise engaged during her
playwriting debut, I got off lightly. I
suspect I would have been left open-
mouthed by its pornographic
blitheness and under-attentive to its
formal daring. Do I go to sleep
confident that my rightful raves will
save my reputation? Not a bit of it. I’m
the man who derided both The 39 Steps
and The Play That Goes Wrong and saw
them becoming huge commercial
successes, handed Olivier awards too.
If the next Ghosts hits, will I be its
brave champion or its collateral
damage? If I get it wrong, I can console
myself with the thought that a play
whose author has an eye to testing the
value-system of the society they’re in- even with a view to altering it –
should expect to provoke confusion,
irritation, outrage and possibly
injustice from critics. If not, then they
too are not doing their job properly.
For all Clement Scott’s
decent reviews, he’s doomedto be known as the man who
got ‘Ghosts’ wrong‘One Fleabag
review read:“I doubt if
this materialwill spin into
a long-
runningradio or TV
series” ’violent debut, since held as one of the
defining plays of the Nineties.
“Blasted isn’t just disgusting, it’s
pathetic,” he wrote. “Miss Kane may
kid herself that she has written a
searing indictment of Britain today.
What she has actually produced is a
lazy, tawdry piece of work without an
idea in its head beyond an adolescent
desire to shock.” Michael Billington of
The Guardian was also moved to
denounce what he saw: “I was simply
left wondering how such naive tosh
managed to scrape past the Court’s
normally judicious play-selection
committee.” He later conceded his
error of judgment, as he did for Harold
Pinter’s adultery-coiled Betrayal (1978),
which distressed him for “its obsession
with the tiny ripples on the stagnant
pond of bourgeois-affluent life...”execration” from newspapers,
the most forceful emanating
from The Telegraph’s Clement
Scott, who recoiled from “an
open drain; a loathsome sore
unbandaged; a dirty act done
publicly; a lazar-house with all
its doors and windows open...”
The disapprobation elsewhere
entailed similar Victorian
expressions of physical and
moral revulsion – a collective
umbrage-taking at Ibsen’s
feminist-minded laceration of
unhappy marriages and
societal hypocrisy, and his
referencing of venereal disease.
Ghosts generated reams of
coverage and made Ibsen a
national talking point.
Unbowed, he predicted the power of
what became acknowledged as the
first great tragedy written about
middle-class people in prose. “All
these fading and decrepit figures who
have spat upon this work will one day
bring upon their heads the crushing
judgment of future literary
historians... My book contains the
future.” There’s a striking correlation
between the critical opprobrium and
the uncompromising resolve of the
playwright to push against convention
to lay bare an essential if unfamiliar
truth.
The outrage at Ghosts found an echo
a century later in the reaction to Sarah
Kane’s Blasted in January 1995, a show
that raced from the Royal Court to the
front pages. While my predecessor
Charles Spencer will likely be
remembered for the risqué phrase
(apropos a naked Nicole Kidman)
“pure theatrical Viagra”, he has
entered the annals too by joining the
chorus of disapproval for Kane’sFleabag is at Wyndhams Theatre until
September 14. Tickets:
delfontmackintosh.co.uk (returns only).
It will be broadcast as part of NTLive
on September 12 (ntlive.nationaltheatre.
org.uk).22 ***^ Tuesday 20 August 2019 The Daily Telegraph
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