A gift for rhetoric

It’s always puzzled me that so few theatre critics are involved in making (rather than interpreting, dissecting and sometimes destroying) theatre. Hats off to Time Out reviewer Robert Shore, who’s quitted the breaker’s yard for the production line. Anxious about this new departure, he admits he ‘finds criticism almost impossible to bear’, although he ‘doesn’t mindpointing out problems with other people’s work’. Yeah, I know the feeling.

In his new play, The Critic, a sneering old-school reviewer (bow tie, goatee, crimson dressing-gown) is ambushed in his house by two actors whose performances he has rubbished. Nice idea. Shore relies heavily on his gift for rhetoric and he brilliantly articulates the mood of frustration and boredom which is the constant mental state of the reviewer. ‘You have stolen a night of my life!’ cries Harry Meacher in a terrific performance as the queeny, preeny critic. And the play boasts a wonderful surprise ending in the shape of Saskia Willis who suddenly…well, I’d better not give it away. And because Shore doesn’t like criticism I’ll refrain from mentioning that a bit of subplotting would have strengthened the script, and he might have introduced a twist that involved the emotional development of the characters rather than a narrative hand grenade lobbed in at the last minute. The show is stylishly directed by Conrad Blakemore, who serenades the audience before curtain-up with a medley of blues hits.

To the Barbican for Mark Ravenhill’s Dick Whittington and the inevitable scene in which Dick’s cat pleads to be sodomised with a screwdriver. But Ravenhill has left his toolbox at home and dashed off an exuberant, celebratory and deeply conservative pantomime. The costumes are gorgeous, the songs highly hummable and the production oozes bonhomie and Christmas zest.