This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
I’m the youngest professional theatre critic in the UK and I’m thinking of retiring. Not bad for a 25-year-old. It’s not because I’m too old. Nor because I’m financially secure enough to never work again. No, I’m contemplating retirement simply because I’m convinced there is no longer any need for theatre critics.
Does anyone actually read theatre reviews? National newspapers continue to slim down arts sections. Theatre coverage, with confined geography, is lucky to survive with slashed wordcounts. Sometimes the Sunday Times devotes more lines to podcasts than it does to theatre. In the golden days, the patron saint of theatre critics Kenneth Tynan luxuriated with 800 words of literary breathing room. Today, most reviews don’t reach half of that. Some papers have cut out the performing arts altogether.
I don’t blame the newspapers. Audiences, understandably, do not want to fork out their life savings or sell an eyeball to nab a decent seat. The plebeian seats in the rafters are still an option, but you won’t have much use for your eyeballs given how punishing the sightlines can be. Then there are the plays themselves: Opening Night, The Enfield Haunting, The Duchess and The Tempest are a handful of the worst recent offenders.
This year will mark five years since the near apocalypse for theatreland that was the pandemic. The recovery has not been easy, problems exacerbated by a cost-of-living crisis and energy price hikes. With producers’ costs spiralling, they have had to fire on all cylinders to keep cash pouring in.
Jamie Lloyd’s The Tempest was like the Venice Biennale
Plan A: reach for the stars. Celebrity casting is not always a lamentable trade-off between profit and art. Punters drawn in by the promise of seeing their favourite celeb in the flesh can grant creative licence to directors whose work would otherwise be consigned to the mustiest fringe theatres — or mainland Europe. A new theatre company, Wessex Grove, has found the golden balance here. I doubt a significant proportion of audiences who poured into the Duke of York’s Theatre for the updated An Enemy of the People care much for Henrik Ibsen, but they had probably heard of Dr Who alumnus Matt Smith.
Here’s the rub. The production crumbled on multiple levels. German auteur Thomas Ostermeier’s angsty vision conjured up all the midlife crisis cringe of a divorced dad on a Harley-Davidson. My fellow critics and I slated it, but I couldn’t help but admire its punkish attitude. Ostermeier is teaming up with Wessex Grove this year with a new version of The Seagull. Tickets are mostly sold out, probably thanks to Cate Blanchett’s casting as Arkadina rather than the London audience’s affection for moody Russian melodrama. The financial security they guarantee means Ostermeier will almost certainly push out the creative boat. Even if that boat capsizes, at least it will be interesting.
But celebrity casting can backfire catastrophically. Much ink has been spilt over Sigourney Weaver’s catatonic turn as Prospero. If, like me, you consider writing art criticism as much an art form as the art itself, then Jamie Lloyd’s The Tempest was like the Venice Biennale, with each critic parading their most savagely beautiful one-liners. But I’d argue that Daisy Edgar-Jones’ Maggie (above) in Rebecca Frecknall’s recent Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is more artistically offensive.
It is one thing to be bad in a bad production. Even if John Gielgud rose from the dead to tread the boards of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane as Prospero one last time, he could not have saved Lloyd’s Tempest, a sulky sludge of mangled poetry and half-baked concepts.
But it’s far worse to be bad in a good production. Frecknall’s return to Tennessee Williams after Summer and Smoke and A Streetcar Named Desire, both deservedly garlanded with awards, solidifies her reputation as one of the country’s most talented directors. It also cements her creative affinity for Tennessee Williams.
As a director she draws each sweaty gasp of bourbon-breathed eroticism buried beneath the text to the stage. But Edgar-Jones’ bloodless performance stuck out. It is worse to be tantalised with a glimpse of theatrical perfection stolen from your grasp than to be offered nothing to chew on at all.
But what does it matter? A stampede of Veja-trainered Gen Z-ers descended on a sold-out Almeida theatre to be in the vicinity of the Edgar-Jones who snogged Paul Mescal in Normal People. Reviews are redundant when shows sell out. Nobody would care if the critics slated it. Our words are window dressing, doomed to collect digital dust.
If stunt-casting fails, there’s always Plan B: adapt to survive. Taking its cue from the infinite monkey theorem, perhaps if we gather an infinite number of producers, composers and playwrights and give them an infinite amount of time, eventually they will adapt every cultural artefact into a musical.
The Devil Wears Prada, Ballet Shoes, Mrs. Doubtfire, Pretty Woman, Mean Girls, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Witches, Back to the Future. There was even a musical version of The Great British Bake Off, although that might just have been a nightmare I had.
Stage adaptations of TV shows and books are not a new cultural phenomenon, but they have proliferated since the lockdown. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, especially if the adaptation breaks new artistic ground. The playwright James Graham’s stage adaptation of Boys From the Blackstuff brought Alan Bleasdale’s saga of unemployment in 1980s Liverpool to a new generation, myself included. Graham’s latest offering, Punch, based on Jacob Dunne’s memoir Right From Wrong, is transferring to the Young Vic. The West End transfer of Eline Arbo’s adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s The Years is also a must-see.
But for every deserving adaptation there is an obvious cash grab — Stranger Things, Dr. Strangelove, The Great Gatsby, Only Fools and Horses, Fawlty Towers: The Play to name but a few. Again, they are not necessarily bad. The Lion King has been ensconced in the Lyceum Theatre for longer than I have been breathing. Critics were lukewarm when it premiered. “A skilful commercial artefact” wrote Michael Billington. He wasn’t wrong.
But too many adaptations risks rendering theatre culturally impotent. An overreliance on them relegates theatre to a secondary art form that rehashes the discarded scraps from other media and turns them into big bucks for producers.
Each new production descended into a finger-wagging polemic
Perhaps it is naïve to believe there could ever be a time again when theatre retakes its place at the forefront of national consciousness as it did when Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court in 1956. Perhaps we are drunk on the memory of the Angry Young Men, courtesy of Tynan’s legendary reviews and theatre’s oral tradition. In theatreland you are only one handshake away from the old guard, a couple of merlots away from someone pouring out reminiscences about days long gone. I like to think there really was a time when heated debates about Pinter, Bennett, Hall, Churchill, Brook and Stoppard erupted from the corners of pubs and burned over dinner tables, a time when Olivier could bring the city grinding to a halt with a single perfect performance.
Recently I’ve been poring through old Seinfeld episodes with my housemate. You cannot imagine my stupefied delight when I stumbled across the episode The Betrayal which parodies the reverse chronological love triangle from Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. It’s unfathomable today. Theatre holds such little cultural capital in the wider world. It would fly over most of the audience’s heads.
But there is cause for optimism. The strongest contender for play of the year and possibly the only show that broke out of the usually solipsistic confines of theatreland and into the mainstream was Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant, which will transfer to the Harold Pinter Theatre this April after last year’s premiere at the Royal Court.
We critics might not be able to agree on much, but it is universally accepted that the Royal Court reached a nadir at the tail end of Vicky Featherstone’s tenure as artistic director in 2023. Each new production descended into a finger-wagging polemic pressing its politics on both sides of your skull until your brains burst from the dull force of its superciliousness. The Court, once the beating heart of countercultural middle-finger raising, had lost its way.
Fortunately, it is no longer haunted by the spectre of identity politics, with new artistic director David Byrne its exorcist-in-chief. Giant traces Roald Dahl and his publishers as they scramble to navigate the fallout of antisemitism accusations. The production is the standout hit from Byrne’s first season not only because it is brilliantly crafted, but it dared to risk ruffling its audience’s feathers by illustrating just how easily anti-Zionism can slip into antisemitism and how easily passionate rhetoric can morph into hate speech.
It’s no finger-wag. It’s a slap in the face, especially given the coincidental, but serendipitous, timing. It’s almost unbelievable to think it’s Rosenblatt’s first play. In its most heated exchanges, it was as if lines were fired from a gun, the stage littered with bullets whose echoes sounded long after. It’s a play that burrows under your skin and stays there. I pray to Saint Tynan that this is the beginning of the Royal Court returning to its roots.
Giant offers a glimpse at the solution to the West End’s woes. Drop the dreary adaptations and dull stunt-cast phone-ins. Bet on bold new writing that isn’t afraid to goad and lacerate. I want theatre that raises whirlwinds with intelligent provocation rather than wallowing in pretentious narcissism. Astoundingly the only other play to ruffle feathers last year was the Almeida’s revival of Look Back in Anger. Critics (as well as my friends) found its beating black heart of sardonic cruelty too exasperating. The Angry Young Men would be proud.
Special treatment needs to be given to young creatives who often bear the brunt of financial pressure and are pushed to the back of the queue, forced to literally wait in the wings. The financial and critical success of debut shows from young writers, such as Daisy Hall’s Bellringers, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe and transferred to Hampstead Theatre and Sam Grabiner’s award-winning Boys on the Verge of Tears, which premiered at Soho Theatre, proves that producers can have their money, their cake and eat it without sacrificing the art that is the backbone of theatre’s identity.
Neither featured celebrity casting. Nor were they adaptations. It would also be good to see some young faces around; most press nights are as youthful as a Viking river cruise. Maybe then theatre can at last retake the wheel at the cultural driving seat. Maybe then theatre will be cool again. Maybe I can stave off retirement, at least for another year.
