Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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It is strange, though perhaps not surprising, that the role of the critic should be called to question. The battle of, and against, critics is an old one, assuming different shapes and forms over time. It is a subject I have often tackled, though when I write now it is because new challenges have again surfaced.

Criticism, in my opinion, is a philosophy, an analytical stand that transcends the play, the film, or the book under review. While reviews are often a question of judgement, criticism implies a deeply pondered opinion based on theoretical and practical principles.

The reason I choose to address the issue of criticism in this column is an article published last week in my favourite London paper, The Independent. The article's subtitle -- "A new generation of reviewers is queuing up to replace the aging elite who dominate the scene" -- brought me back to a particular incident I once witnessed: the emergence of young Kenneth Tynan to become a leading and innovative theatre critic that was, according to the article, "one of the most flamboyant, entertaining and influential critics of the 1950s and 60s". I still treasure his book, He Who Plays King, among my age-old drama library.

Tynan suddenly shot up to challenge established critics and become a sort of "menace" to the theatre world. He was among the new generation of critics at the time and, as such, was a great supporter of up- and-coming playwrights. His positive review of John Osbourne's Look Back in Anger, as well as plays by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, helped integrate those writers, young at the time, into the British theatre tradition.

This article in The Independent made me return to my old tattered archive and dig up a copy of the 1972 issue of Drama, the Quarterly Theatre Review. In it, I found a revealing account on daily papers critics "who scurry away from first nights as the actors take their bows and compose within an hour or so a notice of the play for the next morning papers". The article deals with the specific problems of those reviewers who cover first nights and provides the input of 11 theatre critics for newspapers on the matter.

I have singled out Michael Billington, the theatre critic of The Guardian, for specific reasons: he is among the critics reviewed in 1972 and again last week in an article of The Independent ; secondly, he has held that post until the present time and thirdly, I had the pleasure of meeting him a few years ago when I was invited by the British Council to provide an insight into the English theatre world, which I had first explored in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Billington, of course, belongs to the "old gang", as it were. He has been reviewing for The Guardian since 1971. What he said in the published interview was an echo of what he had disclosed to me six or seven years ago. He insists that inspite of those years, he is still learning: "I feel constantly refreshed by the changing nature of theatre," he says, "it isn't static, it's always shifting in reaction to society, therefore the job is a different job now from what it was when I started. At the moment I don't feel any incentive to stop. There's always something around the corner I would hate not to write about."

Another point explored in the article is the fact that theatre reviewing has always been a male job. Nowadays, this too has changed and I, personally, enjoy the theatre reviews by women -- such as Victoria Segal in The Sunday Times, Georgina Brown in The Mail and Kate Basset in The Independent -- who have broken the male myth.

The article then offers examples of old hands at theatre criticism and their idiosyncrasies: Frank Rich for one, described as "one of America's most respected commentators", was dubbed "the butcher of Broadway" for his acerbic articles in The New York Times.

Young critics, on the other hand, bitterly complained that the continued employment of long-established writers, such as Michael Billington, is creating a log-jam of thwarted younger talent: "Room is simply not made for the next generation to come through in a way that did happen more often for our predecessors," they lament.