THEATRE Criticism: Changing Landscapes is an excellent anthology of essays put together by Duska Radosavljevic. It includes lots of illuminating commentaries from around the world on subjects ranging from the unreliability of criticism in the old Soviet Union to the newly emerging history of internet criticism.
The essays are intelligent, engaging and serious. With one exception. I confess to writing quite the silliest chapter in the book – an overview of fictional theatre critics in films, plays and novels.
Silly it may be, but I don’t think I’ve enjoyed writing anything more. It was a fantastic excuse to read and watch all kinds of things, ranging from pulp-fiction romances to devastating studies of the critical mindset (everyone should read Wilfrid Sheed’s The Critic).
After consuming more of this than could possibly be healthy, I came up with a bit of a theory about people’s misconceptions of theatre critics. You can read that in the book. The fun part, though, was doing the research, so here for your entertainment are a few examples you can find online.
Odd to find a theatre critic in a video game, but we’ll start with this one from Psychonauts, which typifies the way the job is perceived:
The purple-headed amphibian is a crude caricature who could be a descendent of Frederick Skeates in the 1936 movie Men Are Not Gods, an imperious, pipe-smoking autocrat, who dictates his review to his secretary and refuses to say good evening or even to answer the phone (his high-handed manner makes it easier for his secretary to justify rewriting the review to the benefit of the lead actor):
Here’s a remake of A Piano in the House, a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone. Fitzgerald Fortune is a ‘theatre critic and cynic at large’ who gains sadomasochistic pleasure in hearing his wife say how much she hates him and his friend confessing to being in love with her. ‘You just need someone to bully and torture when you feel like it,’ says his wife, framing him as a critic with a psychological desire to ‘hurt people’:
Even songwriters seem to hold a grudge against theatre critics. Here’s Jimmy Webb’s 1970 song Dorothy Chandler Blues. Like many fictional critics, this one is wearing a bow tie, is angry with his wife and appears hell-bent on destruction. ‘Good evening Mr Critic/ How many shows did you close?’ demands Webb, implying that a man who hasn’t written any ‘songs of love’ should not have the right to ‘destroy’ them:
Lightening the tone, here’s clown Bill Irwin in The Regard of Flight being interrupted by Michael O’Connor, playing a comically pedantic critic, missing the point about what’s going on:
Finally, more laughs here as Alfred Molina stars as a children’s theatre critic: