Today is my 68th birthday, so presumably I’m a dead white male walking all too slowly towards my professional grave. Watch me rheumily slobber into my programme before hobbling off and, after a week’s senile reflection, goose-penning a review that attacks Katie Mitchell and Deborah Warner for being women. Funny that I regard them as maybe our two finest British directors – but dead white males are so capricious.

Oh well – I guess I admire Nick Hytner for defending Kneehigh’s production of A Matter of Life and Death. It was a bold choice even for his enterprising National; but the reason some of us weren’t enchanted was that the staging seemed showy and that Emma Rice and Tom Morris’s changes to the text had not made an already silly story less so – not because the director, also Rice, was a woman.

You won’t find a critic who isn’t delighted that the time has passed when it was said that all British directors were male, middle-aged and called Peter. The idea that male reviewers do gender checks on Warner, Thea Sharrock, Marianne Elliott, Annie Castledine or Anna Mackmin is preposterous. Myself, I resisted Mitchell’s Seagull but gave her Iphigenia five stars. Is that treating her with the same seriousness one would accord a male director – or misogyny?

A test of this “misogyny” might be her production of Virginia Woolf’s Waves, which our Samantha Marlowe reviewed and admired. But so did four over 50 male critics, among them the veteran John Peter. And the two males who disliked it did so because it was “arty” ( Telegraph) and “sterile” ( Guardian), not because Mitchell is female.

Let me defend my tribe. We have a far broader spread of critics, in terms of gender and age, than when I started reviewing. Personally, I vow to give up when I lose my sight, hearing, enthusiasm or belief in gender equality. And I’m stunned to discover that Nick, so correct in other ways, is an ageist bigot.

What do you think of Nicholas Hynter's opinion of veteran reviewers?

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