‘In a World of Influencers, We Have Waved Goodbye to the Theatre Critic’

It was hard not to feel a degree of nostalgia watching Sir Ian McKellen playing a man who could make or break theatrical productions in the heyday of newspapers in the recent film The Critic.

I have sat in the stalls reviewing shows for the past 30 years and must reluctantly concede no modern critic wields anything like that sort of power today.

Praise from a few social media influencers with big followings, innovative online campaigns, and – crucially – a hugely popular actor in the leading role are what now make the difference between success or failure for a show, rather than the verdict of any one critic in a state of either reverence or revulsion.

The balance of power shifted not long after the turn of the millennium, when newspaper managements began to dispense with the services of the most revered and expensive critics as theatre advertising migrated from print to online.

Now, Michael Billington – still happily reviewing for Country Life in his eighties after retiring from the Guardian – is the last of the old guard with a real hinterland and passion for theatre whose opinions still count for a great deal with seasoned punters and professionals alike.

Those of us who sit alongside the great man either fulfil the function as a labour of love – with day jobs that pay the bills – or were the former deputies to star critics who have succeeded by default on a fraction of their salaries as they’ve nowhere else to go. We make for what might at best be described as a desultory sight in the stalls, and more than one theatre impresario has admitted to me that he still furnishes us all with complimentary tickets for nostalgic rather than practical reasons.

So many of the old conventions – beginning a first night at 7pm rather than 7.30pm to allow for the deadlines of print newspapers and perching us at the end of rows to enable us to dash out immediately after the curtain comes down to file our reviews – now seem not so much nostalgic, as anachronistic when so few printed newspapers bother to accommodate a theatre opening in the next morning’s paper.

I saw the last days of serious theatre criticism with Jack Tinker still reviewing for the Daily Mail, Nicholas de Jongh at the London Evening Standard, Charles Spencer at the Daily Telegraph, Benedict Nightingale at The Times, and of course the indestructible Billington of the Guardian – and it was exciting as well as educational talking to any of them about a show. They were, every one of them, passionate about theatre and, in their own ways, worthy successors to Kenneth Tynan of the Observer, and James Agate of The Saturday Review and later The Sunday Times.

What is sad about the decline and fall of the critics is great theatre requires that a conversation should begin about it after the curtain comes down and my fraternity played their parts in stimulating and informing it.

Actors, playwrights, set designers, and directors – and all the others who make their living in the theatre – often insist they take no notice of critics, but secretly, at least in the past, a lot of them unquestionably did. Constructive, intelligent criticism – of the kind I still see from Billington in Country Life – genuinely does enrich theatre.

Online there are now some excellent critics and observers of theatre – Rebecca Vines of Broadway Baby, and Mark Shenton come to mind – but none are resourced in the way that they once were.

It seems almost comical re-running that classic 1973 horror film Theatre of Blood – in which Vincent Price bumps off London’s theatre critics for not giving him sufficiently adulatory notices – and seeing his victims driving around in Rolls Royces, having uniformed maids bring in their morning tea and surveying the capital from luxurious penthouses overlooking the Thames.

These days, even for the most savage of reviews it would be an absurd waste of time to even write a letter to a critic – as Judi Dench once did to Charles Spencer, accusing him of being “an absolute shit”, or beginning a feud with one. John Osborne’s with Nicholas de Jongh extended even beyond the grave with a notice up outside his memorial service saying that the Evening Standard man would be refused entry – still less bothering to murder them.

After Tynan died in 1980, Billington seemed to foresee the end was nigh. “The danger is that we shall soon forget the very thing that made him famous: his ability to write about the theatre with a voluptuous commitment”, he wrote of his fellow critic.

“Most dramatic criticism is as ephemeral as the work it describes. Very little survives as literature. Hazlitt’s essays on Kean and Kemble have a vivid, bloodshot urgency. Shaw’s Our Theatres in the nineties memorably demolishes Irving and paves the way for Ibsen. Agate wrote about great actors with gusto and allusive wit. To that select list one has to add Tynan, who not only had the gift for pinning down a performance, but also, as both critic and National Theatre literary manager, helped redefine British theatre”.

Who but Billington can now even remember a time when a critic could claim with any real justification to be in the business of ‘redefining’?

Tim Walker is a playwright. He writes the ‘Mandrake’ column for the monthly Byline Times print edition. He was formerly a political commentator for The New European and the Telegraph