Bury the hatchet with theatre critics? Only in their heads!
PG WODEHOUSE best summed up the tension between luvvies and those whose job it is to pronounce on our efforts: ‘ Have you ever seen a critic during the day? Of course not. They come out at night, up to no good!’
Yet the incident last week of Glasgow playwright Douglas Gordon taking an axe to a theatre wall after receiving a clutch of bad reviews lends a whole new meaning to ‘burying the hatchet’.
His play, Neck Of The Woods, staged at the Home Theatre in Manchester and starring Charlotte Rampling, was savaged by several in the press, with one paper calling it ‘a vanity project’ and another describing it as ‘humourless and sedate’.
Perhaps Mr Gordon’s mistake was to read the notices. Yet none of us in this fickle profession can resist finding out what others think of us. After all, ours is a job in which approbation and praise jostle with rejection and humiliation on an almost daily basis.
Thus, there are only two types of performer: those who read their reviews; and those who read them, but pretend they don’t.
One Hollywood star, until recently a fixture on the London theatre scene, used loudly to claim he never read his, but a friend once saw him in a North London cafe, baseball cap pulled low over his brow, trawling through the newspapers the morning after one of his press nights.
The curious thing is that however many times you’ve been lauded to the skies, it’s always the stinkers you remember.
ASK any elderly thesp to describe the very worst notices in their long and distinguished career and they’ll be able to repeat them, word for word, even if they can no longer remember their own name.
I still recall the Birmingham Evening Post’s damning pronouncement on my performance as Bassanio in The Merchant Of Venice in 1982, when the critic described me as ‘ a thoroughly unsympathetic little squirt’.
Quite right, too; though in my defence I would defy anyone forced to wear dove grey tights, velvet bootees and a custardcoloured codpiece to have made much of a fist of the role.
Today’s luvvies get away pretty lightly. Back in 1786, one critic, reviewing the efforts of a certain Mr Bensley, admitted to ‘a sentiment of amazement that a man so weakly gifted and repulsive in almost every faculty that is necessary for the completion of an actor should have the effrontery sufficient to appear before a rational audience’.
The fact is that bad reviews are an occupational hazard for actors, and even the most celebrated thesps will have experienced their fair share of vitriol.
Diana Rigg was once famously described as ‘ being built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses’; Sir John Gielgud had ‘the most meaningless legs imaginable’; while Tallulah Bankhead ‘barged down the Nile as Cleopatra and sank’.
But, as the recent incident with axe-wielding Mr Gordon shows, the business is littered with instances of artists becoming so incensed that they’ve taken matters into their own hands.
Perhaps t he most volatile exponent was Steven Berkoff, typically cast in villainous roles, who responded to a rotten review about his performance as Hamlet from the critic Nicholas de Jongh by threatening to kill him.
He later claimed it was a joke, but it was an authentic enough performance to make de Jongh request police protection.
Legendary t heatre critic Kenneth Tynan, who turned provoking an actor’s fury into an art form, holds the dubious record of being assaulted by more showbiz stars than anyone else — Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton and Orson Welles among them.
In a recent interview, John Hurt — who was knighted by the Queen last week — recalled sending a letter to a critic called Peter who had mauled one of his performances.
Hurt wrote: ‘ Dear Peter, Whooops. Yours sincerely, John Hurt.’ Peter’s reply read: ‘Dear Mr Hurt, thank you for your short, but tedious letter. Yours sincerely, Peter.’ The pair then met for lunch and laughed it all off.
But it’s not always the poor infantry onstage who get most apoplectic about bad reviews, but the backroom staff: the directors, dramatists and producers.
Playwright George Bernard Shaw sent two tickets to the opening night of his new play to Winston Churchill with the message ‘Bring a friend; if you have one’, only to receive the reply: ‘Cannot attend first night; will attend second — if there is one.’
Perhaps the lesson Mr Gordon should learn is that in art, as in life, revenge is a dish best served cold: which brings me to Noel Coward. Having received a lacerating review for one of his plays, he waited several days before penning a missive to the critic.
‘Dear Sir,’ he began, ‘I am reading your review in the smallest room in the house. As I sit here, I have it before me. Soon, it will be behind me . . .’
OF COURSE, it’s not the critics but the audience whose opinion matters. Though the public can sometimes be even more damning than the professionals. One friend still recalls playing King Lear, the pinnacle of any actor’s dramatic ambitions, and the reaction that followed one of his most harrowing speeches — a rustling of sweet wrappers from the stalls, followed by: ‘Who’s pinched the Raspberry Ruffle?’
But perhaps my favourite story is when a mobile phone rang during a performance of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.
Eventually, it was answered by the miscreant in the audience, who announced in a loud stage whisper: ‘I can’t talk now, I’m watching a play.’
After a pause, clearly being asked about the performance, she replied: ‘No, not very . . .’