Why do people resent the theatre?

By chance, I was living in New York when John McPhee published his New Yorker essay ‘Brigade de Cuisine’. It was 19 February 1979. It caused quite a stir. McPhee described in lip-smacking detail a restaurant which was situated somewhere upstate. He inflamed the reader’s imagination by detailing how delicious the food was without revealing the restaurant’s name or location. McPhee knew what he was up to. He succeeded in animating the most intense aspirational fantasy of middle-class Manhattan. There existed an ideal dinner place of which no one knew. It was, he said, run by a mysterious chef called Otto whose technique was so fast it ‘became a collage of itself’. At one point, I believe, three investigative reporters from the New York Times were assigned to try to identify it. My principal feeling was regret that if McPhee had described an equally perfect unnamed theatre, nobody would have been interested.

The pandemonium unleashed by McPhee came back last week because I was a guest on the River Café podcast. Ruthie Rogers invited me to start by cooking in the Café’s open kitchen. I declined. Would you grill squid in public? Truly, the technical arts have replaced the moral arts in order of attention. These days, nobody buys a newspaper to read the theatre critic. They buy it to read Jay Rayner or Marina O’Loughlin. Henry Winter, the football writer, is said to be worth 50,000 copies. Mind you, theatre has always been distrusted by journalists, because it claims to be more attuned to human behaviour than journalism is. And also – a fatal drawback – it’s about possibility. It’s about how we might live. In clumsy hands, theatre even strays into suggesting how we ought to live.