The Limits of Criticism

In October this year, the Lyric Hammersmith revived Edward Bond’s great breakthrough play Saved. It was the first professional London revival for over 25 years. Most of the critics admired Sean Holmes’s clinically brutal revival, finding once again a horrifying persuasiveness in Bond’s portrait of an alienated, morally numbed generation, whose casual brutality is matched by their mutual neglect. On a bare off-white Lyric stage, there was no hiding, no coyness, just a stark, staring glimpse of who we are and might become. Never having seen the play before, incredibly, I was startled by the play’s vigorous dialogue, its mischievous theatricality, its unflinching bleakness. It united reviewers across the political spectrum. Michael Billington admired the ‘austere clarity that is beautifully realised in Holmes’s production’; Charles Spencer offered that ‘in Sean Holmes’s horribly gripping, brilliantly acted and sparely staged production, it is clear that this is a drama that still speaks powerfully of the way we live now’. Not everyone liked the production unreservedly. Some found the austerity and elegance of the direction took some of the force out of the evening. But everyone recognised the power and penetration of the play.

Well, nearly everyone. Quentin Letts, theatre critic of the Daily Mail, Britain leading newspaper of the far right, did not agree. ‘It is hard to see who will derive much satisfaction from Edward Bond’s unexpectedly boring play’ he begins, unpromisingly. Now, that this is a straight-up admission of his own failure of imagination, since a great many people derived considerable satisfaction from it. ‘The only notable scene is one in which a baby is stoned to death’, he continues. It’s a curious phraseology. If he’d said ‘the one’, I might have been persuaded that he’d heard of this play before and had some notion of what happened in this scene: a scene that is, let us remember, one of perhaps the three or four most iconic scenes in post-war British drama. While I don’t suggest that you need to do an exam to go to the theatre, I do feel that theatre critics shouldn’t be more ignorant than the ordinary theatregoer.

Letts then describes the scene in prurient detail, and compares it to ‘the death of Banquo’s children’ in Macbeth, a scene which better-informed theatregoers will remember doesn’t take place at any point in the play. Undaunted by this he movingly describes the scene as ‘one of the most upsetting in theatre’. But how does Bond’s scene compare to a scene that doesn’t exist? Not well, it seems. ‘Mr Bond’s scene, although 100 times more lurid, lacks power. In the middle of it all, I found myself succumbing to a huge yawn’. The pose is a familiar one: the play is trying to shock; I refuse to be shocked; to demonstrate how unshocked I am, I affect boredom. Of course, I suppose it is possible that Letts was bored, that he can watch the torture and murder of an child without it stirring any interest or feeling. That is a conversation Letts will have to have with himself.

But then Letts brings out his intellectual big guns. ‘Bond is a dogmatic clunker, so intent on his nihilistic sermonising he forgets the truth of human love’. Enough with the posing, here’s his serious critique. I would be interesting to know what Letts means by any of the words in this sentence. Is Bond dogmatic? Is he sermonising? The play seems to me to editorialise very little; it paints a picture and invites us to see patterns and shapes in it. That doesn’t strike me as sermonising. But Letts can invent entire subplots to Macbeth so conjuring up a sermonising subtext is child’s play. But then, is it nihilistic? The reviewers for the Evening Standard, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Metro, Independent, Time Out and the Mail on Sunday all found glimmers of hope, optimism, even redemption. I find those glimmers there too. Letts however was busy hearing a dogmatic sermon, so is unable to find them. And then I’m not sure what he means by calling Bond a ‘clunker’. A play could be a ‘clunker’. Does Bond ‘clunk’? I’m not aware of this but I think that if a person clunks in the privacy of their own home they should be permitted to clunk without adverse comment. On the other hand, this play is certainly not a clunker. As for the meaning of the truly sermonising phrase, the ‘truth of human love’, Letts doesn’t explain. What is ‘irresponsibly optimistic’ about the play, as Bond famously described it, is Len’s persistent love for Pam, his determination to make things better rather than always to tear them down. But Letts, fingers in his ears to keep out an imagined sermon, doesn’t see any of this.

In his manufactured boredom, Letts fancifully decides to let his attention wander. ‘Around me at the state-sponsored Lyric,’ he reports, ‘sat teenagers on some sort of educational trip (paid for from public funds?). One or two tittered. Others played on their mobile phones, ate sweets, dozed, sighed. The schlock-horror failed to grip them’. He has no evidence that these children’s tickets were paid for by public funds; it just tickles him to stir things up, as does his passive-aggressive little reference to the Lyric being ‘state-sponsored’. (And who paid for your ticket, Quentin? That would be the state-sponsored Lyric.) Of course, if this had been a school party they might well have been there by virtue of public funds: most likely that their school is there by virtue of public funds. I hope, but I am not sure, that Quentin Letts does not object to state-schoolkids going to the theatre. And notice how weirdly he builds his case against the play: one or two them tittered. Indeed so? I think I probably laughed only a little. It’s a pretty bleak play. They ate sweets? Well, yes. The theatre sells them. Some people, Mr Letts, can eat sweets and watch a play at the same time. Kids are famous for their multi-tasking. They sighed? There are moments of aching regret in the play. I think I sighed too. Perhaps they dozed too. I’ve dozed in plays. Even plays I’ve been enjoying. Sometimes I am very tired and I find myself dozing. Stop checking out the kids, Mr Letts, and pay attention to the stage. That’s your job.

Letts describes the characters in a cursory way: Pam is a ‘shouting trollop’. Harry is a ‘voyeuristic father’. Mary is an ‘ageing mother’. These are precisely the kinds of capsule dismissals that the play is striving to undermine and which seem to generate the characters’ anomie. It’s not knowing of him to say this; it’s just snooty, pompous, middle-class contempt. And he sums up his little analysis: ‘Apart from trying to intellectualise random violence against a baby, that’s about it.’ In what sense does the play ‘intellectualise’ the violence? In what way is the violence ‘random’? In what way can a play offer ‘intellectual’ analysis? These are interesting theatrical and social questions, but answers from Letts come there none. He has a question of his own: ‘Can the Lyric’s director, Sean Holmes, think of nothing better to stage?’

Edward Bond’s Saved is a classic of post-war British theatre. It has been performed across the world, thousands of times. Edward Bond is feted in France, Germany and elsewhere as one of the great playwrights of his generation. The play has been widely written about, analysed, acclaimed, debated with. It is a course that appears on syllabuses in schools and universities. It is regularly anthologised. Bond has tended not to give permission for revivals of the play, not trusting many directors with this key play in his career. It was, then, a coup for Sean Holmes to get Bond’s support for the production and a privilege for all of us to see. So no, I suspect Sean Holmes could not think of anything better to stage because it is a great play and an excellent choice.

But everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Quentin Letts’s opinions may be stupid, misanthropic, snobbish, ignorant, bilious and ugly, but he is entitled to them. It would be a funny thing if we all thought the same. It takes all sorts to make a world. Etc etc etc.

And it might have ended there. But here’s what Quentin did next. Not content with writing his review and expressing his opinion, Quentin Letts found the names of the private sponsors of the Lyric and personally rang them up, pointing out the many brutal events that take place in the play, with the evident aim of persuading them to withdraw or at least not renew their sponsorship.

Yes, you read that right. A theatre critic is actually personally, directly attempting to have a theatre closed down.

Is there any precedent to this? Theatre critics have done terrible damage to individual artists’ reputations. Tynan did for Rattigan. Harold Hobson stuck the knife into Rodney Ackland. There are critics who have returned time and again to berate a particular artistic director or theatre company. Charles Spencer has it in for Mark Ravenhill. Michael Billington is no fan of Katie Mitchell’s recent work. But most critics accept that their theatre reviews are platform enough. They have had their say, their voice amplified many times louder than any other member of the audience. They are read by hundreds of thousands. They are quoted on posters and leaflets, in adverts and sometimes on the backs of printed playtexts. But I don’t imagine Michael Billington lobbies Nick Hytner personally to persuade him not to employ Katie Mitchell. I doubt that even if Charles Spencer had the power to stop Mark Ravenhill from writing, he would actually use it. But Quentin Letts is seriously, earnestly, practically attempting to have the Lyric closed down.

Let’s note, too, that he’s trying to choke off private sponsorship. What does this mean? He perhaps thinks that the companies that sponsor the Lyric are stupid or ignorant; that they have no idea what the Lyric is like, that they just wrote their cheques without any interest in the theatre. This is a theatre, let’s recall, that staged Sarah Kane’s Blasted last year. Sponsors usually get tickets to previews or press night. I’m sure they knew what they were getting. And they made a market decision; they decided where they wanted to put their money. It seems to me very likely that they are much more intelligent, well-informed, thoughtful and sensitive to the subtleties of art and culture than is the Daily Mail’s theatre critic. It’s even possible that they, unlike Quentin Letts, were aware of Saved. Perhaps one of the sponsorship team went to a state-sponsored school where public money was frittered away educating them about one of the great plays of the post-war world. Perhaps a director of the company takes an interest in theatre, in its ability to talk to the world around it, to engage with the way we live, and felt that the programme being set out by Sean Holmes showed a thoughtful, sombre, engaged and responsible theatre alive to the violence and cruelty in our society.

It’s possible that they didn’t know, of course. The market system would like everyone involved in a market transaction to have perfect information, but as most advocates of the system conclude perfect information is never achievable. Which is why free-marketeers say we should assume that individual members in a market transaction know enough about what they’re doing. (The market, according to the theory, decides what is right and wrong; this is not a judgment that can be made before the market mechanisms go to work.) No sponsor of the Lyric has been misled; it’s been clear what the Lyric’s profile is like: serious, responsible, theatrical, community-minded, focused on new writing. So Quentin basically doesn’t have the courage of his market convictions; he wants to impose his tittle-tattling censorious morality on private sponsors and a public theatre.

What spurred Quentin Letts to action? He claims to have been bored by the play - he found himself succumbing to a huge yawn - but his actions tell another story. His actions tell the story of someone very shocked indeed, so shocked that he felt the need to warn other people, who he assumed are as ignorant as he is, and so he took the extraordinary step of writing to them so that he would never have to be shocked like this again.

And what this reveals is that although I might tolerate Letts’s opinions, he doesn’t tolerate mine. I happen to think Saved is a good play but I think you ought to be able to see it to decide for yourself. He thinks Saved is a bad play and wants you not to see it, not to be able to see it. He wants, in other words, for his critical opinion to prevail over everyone else’s: it is not enough for the little tyrant of the Mail that he slags the play off to his readers; he wants to erase all other opinions too. He wants to close the Lyric and he’s trying to close the Lyric.

What should a critic be? A critic should respond truthfully to what happens on stage. And let’s use Bernard Williams’s notion of being truthful: a critic should respond sincerely and accurately to what they see. Ideally, a critic should be open to each production they see, not prejudging, asking themselves, right to the last moments, what is this production, this play, this performance trying to do? Why is it trying to do these things? Has it achieved them? How did it achieve them? Were those aims worthwhile? And a critic should be aware that they are contributing to a public discourse; yes, they’re selling tickets, but they’re also contributing - en masse - to a broad public conversation about the theatre. It is because their voice is so amplified in that conversation that they should take write with care and responsibility, so they don’t shout people down. Quentin Letts has fallen very short of this definition of the critic’s role. The critic opens up a conversation. Quentin Letts does not. He closes things down.

Because he’s not a critic. He’s a troll. He enjoys stirring up indignation because that’s his job. The Mail likes it because whenever he writes one of his stupid reviews, gullible idiots like me retweet or Facebook it and send more traffic to the Mail’s site. And that allows them to charge more for advertising. Letts is, in the perfect words of Stewart Lee, someone with ‘outrageous politically incorrect opinions which he has for money’. He really is no different from Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Littlejohn, Liz Jones, even ‘Mad’ Melanie Phillips (though she is, in fairness, much more intelligent than he is). I’ve probably given him too much space on my blog and in my head already. No one I know who works in theatre takes his opinions seriously. But this really is something different.

Quentin Letts is an ignoramus and like so many ignorant people he is consumed with malice for those things he does not understand. His behaviour is that of a censor, unable to accept that his opinions should be weighed against others. His actions over Saved have crossed a line. A critic has sufficient power in their review column; to go further, as Letts has done, is incompatible with his role as a theatre critic. He is a disgrace.

** UPDATE: In the spirit of justice and balance, I should say  that Quentin Letts emailed me today, 16 December 2011 - in good humour - to deny having made these phone calls. I heard the rumours of his behaviour a month ago and had it confirmed by three people close to the Lyric this week. But I wasn’t on the other end of the phone back in October, so of course I can’t prove categorically that he made them. But this should give us pause; he may not have made the calls; he may have encouraged a colleague to do it; or, indeed, there may be a Quentin Letts impersonator abroad.

However, let’s also remember that he’s done exactly the same thing in print. This is from the Daily Mail on Saturday 15 October 2011, p. 44. And a week later, 22 October 2011, p. 42, he has another go . And this is the headline of his piece on the RSC’s Marat/Sade. And this is his review of Blasted on 5 November 2010, p. 68. And let’s not forget his gloating over the arts cuts earlier this year. Quentin Letts has form, sadly, and it’s obvious that not only has he crossed a line with regard to Saved, but he’s been crossing it for a long time..