Do you agree with AA Gill? Is theatre badly served by critics? Have your say at the foot of this article

First nights are special theatre. These are moments when the creatives let go of the creation. There is nothing more to be done. Actors are the only artists who have to go on performing through a disaster, so there is a particular electricity, an atmosphere in the theatre. Much depends on the first night. And, when it’s over and the audience applaud and cheer and, more than likely these days, rise to their feet for a standing ovation, you may notice a little gang of hunted characters sidle out of the stalls and scuttle up the aisle. They seem to be escaping, running away. Many will be dressed in old macs, shiny-buttocked suits and cheap, comfy shoes, and be carrying sagging briefcases and Tesco bags. They keep their heads down and don’t look back, and they don’t do applause. You might imagine they were rude, disrespectful philistines. But you couldn’t be more wrong.

These creeping things are the critics, keepers of the flame of theatre, the referees of the muse, and they’re running out not because they want to get to the bar first, but because they write their reviews overnight for the morning’s first editions. Well, they used to. Not all papers now do “overnights”, but even those with nothing to write on the spot will probably be rushing for the exits. By convention, first nights start half an hour early for the convenience of the critics and the inconvenience of everyone else.

And they all have to have aisle seats. Most old London theatres traditionally had an aisle down the middle of the front stalls, which was wasteful, so they put in what’s called continental seating, like cinemas and every other theatre everywhere else in the world. More people can have good seats. But the London critics shrieked and stamped and held their breath until they were very nearly sick because they all had to have an aisle seat in the centre of the stalls. Nicholas de Jongh, the relentlessly miserabilist critic of the London Evening Standard, said that removing the aisle might even contravene health-and-safety regulations. So, with a sigh and a rolling eye, managements that can will take out seats to create an aisle for first nights. Like fractious children, the critics get to sit where they want so they can turn their backs on the bows and hurry away. So, why do they do it? You’d imagine they’d do the performers the courtesy of clapping and leaving all of five minutes later with the rest of us. I don’t think even they know why they do it. I wonder whether most of them know what they’re doing in a theatre any more.

No aspect of the culture is as badly served by its critics as the theatre is. Many of the national press reviewers who haunt the lobbies of the West End, picking up their complimentary programmes and free glasses of screwtop wine, are a moribund, joyless, detached bunch. Where are the voices that ring out as being aesthetically intelligent, passionate, current and, most important, entertaining?

Here are some of them on The Sound of Music, restaged last year: “As I watched, my eyes were often unexpectedly filled with tears, and having felt 51 going on 84 when I entered the theatre, I left with a spring in my step and a soppy smile on my face. Suddenly the world briefly seemed a better, brighter place.” Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph.

“Climb every mountain? Sure, and after this show you’ll want to do a little dance, too, on the summit.” Paul Taylor, The Independent.

“Sweet, clever Connie [Fisher, as Maria] knocked ’em flying. Viewers of Britain, you chose well. She’s as natural and unsugared and wholesome as one of those pots of vegan yoghurt. Just listening to her makes you feel healthy.” Quentin Letts, Daily Mail.

Can you imagine Kenneth Tynan or Bernard Levin writing this? Or George Bernard Shaw? Britain has a glittering heritage, not just in theatre itself, but in writing about theatre and criticism. Dickens and GBS; Levin; Tynan, the doorman of modern theatre, and his ever-game equivalent on The Sunday Times, Harold Hobson. But turn to theatre reviews today and the first thing that will strike you is nothing. Nothing at all. Criticism is too often bereft of elan, panache or even the mildest stylistic polish. I once collected reviews from various national critics for the same play and asked the theatrical types around my dinner table if they could tell whose was whose. Nobody could. They had a uniform, dank sogginess.

The lexicon of adjectives used by critics is lick-sticky with thumbing – all the exclamatory clichés of the marquee, plus the thudding repetition of faux sagacious pats of approval, like the rote remarks of a 12-year-old’s ballet teacher who’s given up caring. Tynan wrote: “Critics are consumers of one art, drama, and producers of another, criticism. What counts is not their opinion, but the art with which it is expressed... The best informed man will be a bad critic if his style is bad.” Style aside, they do like a billboard quote: “I laughed till I cried”; “A hit, a palpable hit”; “Should be packing them in a year from now”; “A joyous spectacle that lights up the West End”. But how often have punters come out of some torpid show, ruefully looked up at a poster and read: “If you see nothing else this year, see this”?

The chorus of critics has forgotten that its first calling is as journalists, to write readable, intelligent and amusing articles. Maybe you’re thinking: “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? He’s another critic.” But look where theatre criticism often finds itself: buried in review sections, along with regional contemporary dance and David Mellor’s classic record collection. It only seems to make it to the front of the paper if there’s a photograph of a Hollywood star or reality-show winner to run with it. I asked an arts editor why theatre criticism had slipped in cultural importance when theatre is one of the things we do supremely well. “Simple,” he said. “The quality of the writing. I’m selling papers, not seats. At the moment, we’ve got a lot of critics who are about as exciting as watching street mime in Düsseldorf.”

Does any of this matter outside the paper walls of Fleet Street? Theatres are full, and there are queues of musicals waiting to come into London. When talent is picked by reality television and cinema stars guarantee box office, who cares about critics? Well, they matter. They’re vital precisely because performers can be picked by reality TV and stars are hired to fill seats for a couple of months. Every room in the culture needs strong criticism; it needs committed critics to keep the form strong and innovative.

Look at restaurants and food. The incremental improvement in the quality and sophistication and enjoyment of eating, cooking and buying food has coincided with the rise of good, angry, witty, opinionated writing. It’s the same with contemporary art and books. Literary criticism may be as corrupt as a Russian customs officer’s Christmas party, but it’s vital and commands attention for books. Varied and lively opinionated criticism isn’t necessarily good for individual productions or artists, but it is good for the genre as a whole. If there is no intellectual, aesthetic, political, spiritual, passionate argument about what gets made, then the only arbiters of value are the box office and the phone-in. Bad culture drives out good unless there is someone there to stop it. Look at cinema, which is now virtually critic-proof.

What the critics actually have to say about the theatre is growing in irrelevance, mostly because none of us knows what they think about the theatre. I have no idea who it is they imagine they’re writing for. Possibly each other. They seem to have collectively lost belief in their ability to criticise. And, if you don’t know that your opinion is more valuable and useful than those of all the other people in the room with you, what is the point of expecting to get paid for it? What the producers think of the critics, page 6 The chorus of critics seems to think that the only criterion for writing about plays is having seen a lot of other performances, preferably by dead people. For them, theatre can only be viewed as part of a mythic, ghostly train, a sort of Hinduism with wigs where everything is a reincarnation of something else. They keep dusty ledgers of double-entry Hamlets, Heddas and Seagulls. Performances and sets are weighed and measured like pork. A myopic tunnel vision of experience is brought to the table. Tynan, again, once wrote about a play that it failed, not in the way most plays fail, but in the way a dinner party fails. I can’t imagine any of today’s critics writing that. Not because they couldn’t compose anything that dryly observant, but because I can’t imagine any of them at a dinner party. The only context for theatre in their reviews is other theatre. Drama exists in a closed museum of nostalgic experience.

Yet theatre is all about the real world. How often do you hear a critic mention seat prices, or whether the stalls might be value for money for an audience that probably doesn’t get to the theatre more than twice a year? The critics’ experience rarely seems to coincide with the lives of those sitting with them in the dark. Their dry litany is combined with a Uriah Heepish sycophancy for actors, directors and producers, an awkward, unctuous sucking-up. It’s not that they’re corrupt, but, as Hilaire Belloc said, there’s no need when you see what they’ll do unbribed. Critics are culture’s traffic wardens. If you want to be loved, work with puppies.

I asked a producer how important the critics are to his business. “Ten years ago, very. Some could make a show or seriously cripple it. Now, not much. We still get the quotes for the posters, but it’s really only a habit. There certainly isn’t any one critic that theatregoers or people in the business have to read. There’s nobody like Frank Rich was on Broadway, or Tynan or Levin here. I can’t think of a single one whose reports would make someone go to the theatre for the first time. It’s sad, really. They’re sad, really.”

Find out what the producers think of the critics

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