Publish and be damned

It is probably fair to say that whether it be in the realm of the theatre, cinema or literature, critics are not the most beloved people. British playwright John Osborne once observed: “Ask a working writer what he feels about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.” Someone who might agree with these assertions is veteran actress Diana Rigg. It is hard to believe that the lady who played the slinky Emma Peel in the idiosyncratic British TV series The Avengers, and went on to become one of the early Bond girls, will next month be celebrating her 80th birthday.

Recently Rigg came out with a book, No Stone Unturned, a compilation of the worst theatrical reviews in history, including her own performances. In a review commenting on the actress’ nude scene in the play Abelard and Heloise, Paul Simon, of the New York Magazine wrote: “Diana Rigg is built like a brick basilica with insufficient flying buttresses”.

Now that is not nice

But it could have been worse. Glenda Jackson once heard BBC radio commentator Jack De Manio describe her as having “a face to launch a thousand dredgers.”

It prompted me to dust off the files and

Final curtain

Theatre critics can be particularly cruel and no one is spared. When Peter O’Toole played Macbeth, critic Robert Cushman wrote: “His performance suggests he is taking some kind of personal revenge on the play.”

The toxic relationship between performers and critics goes back a long way. At the turn of the 19th century, George Bernard Shaw, unimpressed by Mrs Patrick Campbell’s performance in Fedora, commented: “It is greatly to Mrs Patrick Campbell’s credit that bad as the play was, her acting was worse. It was a masterpiece of failure.”

One of my favourite reviews came from Kenneth Tynan on actor John Neville. Tynan enthused with: “Here at last I felt was the authentic Richard II … my excitement was marred however, by the fact that the play being presented was Henry V.”

Even Katherine Hepburn was on the receiving end of a Dorothy Parker review. After watching Hepburn in The Lake, Parker wrote: “Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions, from A to B.”

Audience participation

While audiences sometimes have to suffer poor performances, it must be remembered that performers may have to put up with lousy audiences. Oscar Wilde once commented: “The play was a great success, but the audience was a total failure”.

Pianists are perhaps the most vulnerable and some have even walked offstage when their sonatas were disrupted by the sound of telephone jingles, unwrapping boiled sweets and hacking coughs. Some audiences make their own entertainment.

Reviewing an abysmal Broadway comedy, critic George K Kaufman observed: “There was laughter in the back of the theatre leading to the belief that someone was telling jokes back there.” Authors and critics can have rocky relationships. Setting the tone back in the 1870s was Mark Twain who on one of Ambrose Bierce’s publications offered: “For every laugh in the book there are five blushes, ten shudders and a vomit.”

There is always something satisfying seeing publishers put in their place. After receiving a response to his manuscript for Travels With My Aunt which read: “Terrific book, but we’ll need to change the title.” Graham Greene replied in a telegram: “No need to change the title, easier to change the publishers’.”

The title wasn’t changed.

Mary Higgins Clarke is a hugely successful author, but that didn’t appear to be the case after she submitted her first short stories.

The publisher replied: “Miss Clark, your stories are light, slight and trite.”

Torturing mice Nowhere man

Some might find this hard to believe but Crutch was once a film reviewer at the Bangkok Post. Reviewing Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, I got egg on my face after criticising the performance of one of the stars who unbeknown to me, was holidaying with friends in Bangkok. The following day I was at the wrong end of a rather embarrassing telephone conversation.

The grim details are in the book, The Long Winding Road to Nakhon Nowhere, which has finally landed on the shelves at Asia Books and its branches. My apologies to any readers who suffered fruitless visits to the bookshops hunting this evasive tome.