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Sunday 12 October 2008

Critical condition

Lloyd Evans on the perils of being both playwright and critic

‘No man sympathises with the sorrows of vanity.’ Dr Johnson was speaking of a poet who looked to his friends for solace after his verses had been savaged in the press. He got none. That’s the risk all artists take. I’ve been through this experience myself (and I’m about to submit to the ordeal once again), and though I found it hurtful and humiliating to have my work trashed in public, it also enriched my understanding of the theatre and assisted me as a professional critic.

In 2005 Toby Young and I collaborated on a sex farce, Who’s the Daddy?, which enjoyed a sell-out run on the London fringe and won a best new comedy award in a trade paper. The following year we wrote A Right Royal Farce, a light-hearted spoof set in Buckingham Palace. We knew it was a big risk to mount a second satirical comedy in the same theatre. The law of the newsroom states that success should be followed by failure and our new play needed to be only a teeny bit worse than our first for us to get a right royal hammering. And we did. The critics didn’t just skin us alive, they turned us into handbags. ‘The worst thing to hit London since the Blitz,’ said one of the kinder notices. A sofa-filler on Late Review called the play the most worthless human artefact the programme had ever considered. In one of the newspapers where stars are awarded, the reviewer called for a whole new scale of evaluation to be invented. Giving us ‘no stars’ was far too charitable. We deserved negative stars, death stars, black holes, imploding supernovae.

In my columns I’d vultured other people’s work plenty of times. Now I discovered how it felt. And it wasn’t nice. When Kingsley Amis said a poor review should put you off your breakfast but not your lunch he was dead right anatomically. It gets you in the stomach, the organ of comfort and regeneration. You feel queasy and frail, holed below the waterline. And you can’t turn to loved ones in your distress because, like Dr Johnson, they ascribe your sombre mood to a ruptured ego. Or they assume you’ve enamelled yourself like a tortoise with some magical armour that deflects the critical bullets with harmless pings. In any case, who wants to admit to being ‘tortured by bad reviews’? It’s like admitting to scrofula. But once it was over I found it oddly liberating. I no longer suffered pangs of guilt when attacking other playwrights’ work. I’d dished it out and now I could take it too. I’d been bloodied and that gave my criticism added legitimacy.

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