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Wednesday 9 July 2008

Status Anxiety

Now I can't even claim that my play was panned by the press because I was a critic

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‘Few shows of such embarrassing, authorial ineptitude can have hit the London stage since the Blitz.’ That was the verdict of Nicholas de Jongh, the Evening Standard drama critic, on the satirical play about the royal family that Lloyd Evans and I wrote in 2006. It wasn’t the only bad review we got, but it was by far the most damning. According to Jongh, A Right Royal Farce was not just your run-of-the-mill damp squib; it was the worst show to appear in London since 1941.

You can imagine my glee, therefore, when I learnt that Jongh had written a play himself. ‘Aha’, I thought. ‘The scourge of London’s theatreland is about to get a taste of his own medicine.’ He would learn the lesson that he and his colleagues had so brutally doled out to me and Lloyd two years earlier, namely, that when it comes to withering reviews, it is better to give than to receive.

At first, Jongh couldn’t persuade anyone to put on his play. Called Plague Over England, it is about John Gielgud’s arrest and conviction for cottaging in 1953 — a fairly promising subject, I would have thought, but a reading at the Duchess Theatre in 2006 failed to create much interest. Eventually, Jongh received an offer from the artistic director of a London fringe theatre, but he had to turn it down when he discovered it was contingent on £80,000 being wired to the theatre within seven days.

A second reading was arranged at the Royal Court, but few of the artistic directors and producers Jongh invited bothered to turn up. It looked as though Lloyd and I would be cheated of our moment of schadenfreude — not to mention the countless others whom Jongh had antagonised over the years, including Steven Berkoff, who once issued him with a death threat. Then a saviour appeared. Neil McPherson, the artistic director of a fringe theatre in Earl’s Court called the Finborough, offered Plague Over England a slot. Lloyd and I were cock-a-hoop. We would get our pound of flesh at last.

The press night was last Friday and the following day I leapt out of bed at 6 a.m. and beetled along to the local newsagent to pick up the morning papers. The first critic I turned to was Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail. I knew I could rely on him to be suitably damning. After all, he had described our play as ‘a right royal flop’. ‘It is maddening to report,’ he began, ‘that Nicholas de Jongh...has written a rather interesting play.’

Shurely shome mishtake? Without reading the rest, I tossed the Mail aside and turned to the Guardian. Michael Billington, the doyen of Fleet Street’s drama critics, was guaranteed to take aim at his former Guardian colleague. ‘Well-structured, important and sardonically funny,’ he wrote, awarding Plague Over England four stars.

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