Critics again

I hope Mark Lawson won't mind my selectively quoting from his review for next week's Tablet. His remarks are about a revival of Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged. But the underlying argument applies a fortiori to dance criticism.


"Remarkably, three British theatre critics, having also been on duty three decades back, were able to compare Grant’s performance with Bates’s (1975). Perhaps inevitably, they found Grant's wanting; inevitably because it’s very rare for a veteran football writer, for example, to conclude that a modern player is better than, for example, George Best. A memory will generally tend to trump the contemporary: a phenomenon accounted for either by professional decline over the ages or the effect of ageing on professional critics.


But the widespread measuring of Otherwise Engaged against an original which most of the audience for the revival never did and never will see seems to be a terrible denial of the what separates theatre from other written art-forms: the way in which a play is constantly remade."

And from Peter Preston in the Guardian

"I couldn't help remembering a pretty vehement editorial exchange with Jeremy Isaacs when he was running Covent Garden. Opera critics, he said, were a curse on the art they purported to serve. They'd all been doing it too long. They never saw anything through the new eyes of a new young audience. They were always comparing this Tosca or that Figaro with allegedly definitive ones savoured in Aix or Milan three decades before. You could, in short, have so much experience that a musty, self-reverential scholarship threw enjoyment into the orchestra pit.

That was surely putting it too hot and strong. But then turn to last week's reviews of Simon Gray's Otherwise Engaged at the Criterion. 'Two things lodged in my mind when I saw the premiere production in 1975,' began Charles Spencer in the Telegraph. Poor Richard E. Grant was doomed to compete with 'memories of Alan Bates', continued Michael Billington in the Guardian. 'If we could resurrect Bates to reprise the role of the urbane publisher he created', we might think this Gray's best play, added Benedict Nightingale in the Times

Three critics showing their long-term love of theatre and accumulated scholarship, I know. But the spectre of Isaacs still hovers. They all remembered the wonder of Bates gone by. And you'd probably have to be fifty-plus to remember it too."