Something to Say

This is the full text version of the interviews with the Theatre Critics which appeared in Volume 6 Issue 2 of Shakespeare at the Centre

I spoke to Michael Billington (MB) drama critic for the Guardian. Michael Coveney (MC) critic for the Financial Times, The Observer, The Daily Mail, The Guardian and The New Statesman and Alastair Macaulay (AM), chief theatre critic for The Financial Times.

What made you want to be a theatre critic?

MC “I wanted to be a theatre critic to convey my enthusiasm, take part in a discussion with the audience, and complete the circle of participation in going to theatres.”

MB “The excitement of watching great actors in my youth, often in Stratford-on-Avon: e.g. Olivier as Macbeth and Titus Andronicus and Gielgud as Lear Redgrave and Ashcroft in Antony and Cleopatra.”

AM “I didn’t want to be one until I tried doing it. In my teens, I got into the habit of writing to friends, long and frequent letters about stage performances I saw. When I was twenty, two things happened (i) I fell in love with ballet, so that many of my letters started to be about that and (ii) during my final term at Cambridge I played the leading role in a play to such success that I thought I wanted to become an actor. My family put me off becoming an actor, but the friends who read my letters kept encouraging me to become a dance critic. It took two years before I began to take them seriously. I happened to get a break as a dance critic in 1978 when I was twenty-two. Only once I had started did I suddenly realise how fulfilling it could be – how it fulfilled all the enthusiasm and analysis I had been putting into the letters.

I still continued to go to theatre and opera, and in 1988, when I worked in New York as a dance critic to The New Yorker, friends used to say that they could understand why I came to New York to write about dance but not why I was going back to London to do so; they went to London to see theatre. On my return to London in late 1988, this made me start to go to London theatre more seriously and more often. When I joined the Financial Times as its second dance critic in November 1988, the arts editor liked my work well enough to want me to write on other subjects as well as dance. First I became one of the newspaper’s music critics, which gave me plenty to do between 1988 and 1994, and I began to write some freelance theatre journalism in 1989. Then when Michael Coveney left the FT in December 1989, I was asked to become a full-time theatre critic, to which I replied “If you’re silly enough to ask me, I’m silly enough to say yes”.

I started regular FT theatre reviewing in January 1990. Plenty of what I saw at first was unremarkable, though I enjoyed the sheer writing; and I found it much easier to write about the theatre than about dance or about music (which is not to say I did it better). Gradually during 1990, however, I saw a number of productions that really taught me how large and rewarding the field of British theatre could be (particularly in contrast to the often limited and repetitious range of London dance). The more revelatory plays included Lope de Vega’s Punishment without Revenge and von Horvath’s Figaro Gets Divorced, both staged at the Gate, the former by Stephen Daldry, the latter by Laurence Boswell. Meanwhile, I was constantly discovering good and great plays new and old, and was deepening a love of Greek drama, Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekov that had begun in my school days. I remember a single Saturday in, I think, 1991 when I saw, (a) Lope de Vega’s The Gentleman from Olmedo at the Gate, (b) Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist at Wyndhams, and (c) Hedda Gabler at the Playhouse. Nonetheless, I remained busy with dance and music writing too.

In 1993, I was invited to become chief dance critic and second theatre critic to another newspaper. The FT countered by asking me to become its chief theatre critic and remain its second dance critic. I chose the latter, and started as chief theatre critic in 1994. Fortunately for me, the theatre that I saw in 1994 helped me to feel I hadn’t made the wrong decision: I began to discover quite how much there might be to find in the plays of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Alan Ayckbourn, Tom Stoppard. I’ve stayed in the job ever since.”

What do you think are the essential qualities of a good theatre critic?

MC “The essential qualities of a good critic are enthusiasm, resilience, good health, an open heart and, most importantly, an ability to write with something to say.”

MB “The ability to write. The capacity to concentrate in the theatre. A knowledge of theatre history. The ability of set a production or performance in context. Honesty of response.”

AM “A flair for communication. A gift for sincere enthusiasm. The stamina to keep going to a minimum of four performances per week for years on end. A keen sense of not only theatrical criteria but also moral criteria. The desire to open you heart to your readers about works of art in a way that might make you feel sheepish among friends. The ability to entertain but not to make yourself the centre of the entertainment. The sense that following art makes you more human.”

When do you think the best years of theatre were? Are we living them? Have they passed already? Or are they yet to come?

MC “The best years of theatre are always yesterday and tomorrow. The first things one sees -- at the RSC, the Wars of the Roses and David Warner's Hamlet -- live with you for ever.”

MB “Who knows?? While acknowledging the past one always has to believe in the excitement of the present.”

AM “What timescale are we talking? The millennium 1000-1999 was better for theatre than the millennium 0-999 and I had enough sense to be aware of this as the last millennium drew to an end. Let’s narrow the timescale then. The second half of the last millennium, 1500-1999, was better for theatre than the first half, and I knew this too.

As a dance critic, I really did catch the end of the golden age: I saw the premieres of ballets by Balanchine and Ashton. The experience taught me just how rich it can be to follow the work of a great artist during his lifetime and in the years immediately following his death. So I must always remain curious about what it was like to follow the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov when they were still young. And I will always assume that no current performance of these plays can have all the features that had distinguished them originally. Since I adore reading theatre history, I will always regret that I missed the performances of the 1920s and 1930s and the drastic changes in British theatre in the 1950s and 1960s. And I will always assume that Edith Evans, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier in their prime had kinds of greatness that are not matched by the actors I have been used to watching (I saw Richardson in three plays, but missed the others).

Nonetheless, our own era seems to me uniquely rich in that the past is ever increasingly available – in print, on video, on DVD, on audiotape, on CD, on TV, on radio. It seems to me that, onstage or off, we have now a more rounded view of Shakespeare than generations had been 1650 and 1950, and that a British theatregoer (infinitely better off than almost all his foreign equivalents) can build up a fuller experience of plays in performance by the Greeks, by the Spanish Golden Age playwrights, by Corneille, Moliere and Racine, by Goldoni and Marivaux, by Schiller, Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov, and by Beckett than any previous generation could have done.

However, the 1990s seem to me to have been a fuller and richer decade than the 2000s so far. Regional British theatres are in recession. The Royal Shakespeare Company is no longer a year-round presence in London theatre, and is a less rounded company. Stoppard’s most recent plays have not matched Arcadia (1993) or even The Invention of Love (1997); the last classic Ayckbourn was Communicating Doors (1994). No fringe theatre today brings the range of drama by foreign (mainly dead) playwrights as the Gate did in the years 1990-94. The Royal Court’s supply of new plays has been less remarkable since 1999 than it was up to that date, and even the Bush Theatre seems less remarkable in its supply of new plays than in the 1990s.

The 2000s have brought to Britain a wide range of excellent new plays and new productions of old plays; I’m still glad to be a theatre critic. Nonetheless, since the 1990s seemed more abundant for the reasons I have given, I do not see that British theatre is currently in a state of growth or improvement. Nor does theatre outside Britain.

As for the future, the most useful lesson I learnt in my first years as a critic from senior critics was this: “Never predict”.”

What’s been the highlight of the RSC’s Complete Works festival so far?

MC “I haven't seen everything in the Complete Works, but I much enjoyed Antony and Cleopatra, which was skilful, sensual, beautifully staged, spiritedly acted.”

MB “The Indian A Midsummer Night's Dream. The RSC Antony and Cleopatra. The German Othello.”

AM “Thanks to a sudden and appalling cold, I had to miss Tim Supple’s Dream, about which I have since heard much. But I have seen the rest. The highlight has been Marianne Elliott’s Much Ado in the Swan, and particularly Joseph Millson as the best Benedick of my experience (which goes back to Alan Bates, Roger Allam, and the miraculous Mark Rylance).”

What’s been the best performance of Shakespeare you have had the pleasure to review?

MC “The best Shakespeare performance I have ever reviewed was Robert Stephens as King Lear, a triumph of a weak man (Stephens was very ill) over adversity, courageous and lyrical, volatile and poetic. Michael Gambon's Lear and indeed John Wood's might each have been greater, but neither moved me so much as that of Stephens.”

MB “All round I’d say the Trevor Nunn Macbeth in the The Other Place in 1976 with McKellen and Dench. It re-defined the play and opened up new possibilities for staging Shakespeare in chamber spaces.”

AM “Oy vey: what a question! Alas, I never really wrote about some of the best Shakespeare stagings I saw by Peter Hall, John Barton, Adrian Noble, Nicholas Hytner, Sam Mendes.

Of those, I did write about: Jude Kelly’s Merchant of Venice? Tim Supple’s Comedy of Errors? Richard Eyre’s King Lear? Michael Boyd’s Midsummer Night’s Dream? His staging of the Henry VII, Richard III tetralogy? David Farr’s Coriolanus?

I will choose the Boyd account of Henry VI Part 1, Henry VI Part 2, Henry VI Part 3 and Richard III. Amazing in its ensemble, exquisite in its costumes, haunting in its three-dimensional stage imagery, it was revelatory in the way it opened up patterns and themes running throughout the tetralogy: above all, the mirror theme of fathers mourning sons and sons mourning fathers. I will always remember Talbot looking for his son “Where is my other life?”, then looking up to see the dead body of his son hoisted aloft above the battle and crying “My Icarus, my blossom”, and the way these same two actors (Keith Bartlett, Sam Troughton) went on to play a succession of father-son duos right through to Derby and his stepson Henry VII in Richard III. Most poetically of all, in one Henry VI battle scene, this father and son were locked into each other like succubi, taking pendulum-like turns to become corpse and mourner in the scene where a father finds he has killed his son and a son finds he has killed his father.

The plays seemed to take us from a mediaeval Malory-type world of endless civil war, baronial wranglings, and throne-bent ambition, of French-sent belles, dames sans merci (both Joan of Arc and Queen Margaret were played by the same woman and Joan’s three scarlet-angel comrade spirits take several other human guises) and chivalry perverted, of magic and antic Death, into the dawn of the modern era. We kept seeing and hearing bones, seeing magic circles in the air; a Charon-like keeper of the keys. And the young Shakespeare’s treatment of these themes also made him seem – as never before in my experience – to be composing in many respects a tetralogy like Wagner’s Ring Cycle; a vast drama about the pursuit of power and marked by tragic crimes against nature. Richard III (Aidan McArdle), this misshapen gnome who acquires dominion by his deliberate renunciation of love: he was astonishingly like Wagner’s Alberich, both in his bitter comedy and his restless joylessness.”

What’s been the worst performance you have ever had to sit through?

MC “King Lear again. There was a ghastly production by the short-lived Welsh National Theatre in the early 1980s. Everything went wrong. People who had died got up and walked off the stage thinking they were in the wings. A purse of money was thrown to Oswald and sailed over his head into the audience. Lear's beard came off in the tent scene. It was hilariously, almost invigoratingly, bad.”

MB “Possibly an all female Troilus and Cressida at New End, Hampstead some time in the 1970’s I seemed a touch perverse and I left at the interval.”

AM “Maybe the Peter Sellars’ Merchant of Venice (Barbican 1994). On paper, this sounds arresting, original. It was set in Venice, California, the drama transposed so that Shylock was black and was talking about the plight of blacks in America; and Antonio was involved in a thoroughly gay relationship with Bassanio. But the production was laden with videos and screens and amplification, and was so dull that a quarter of the press-night audience left after the interval and several distinguished people who remained were seen to fall asleep.

But maybe worse than that have been several stagings at Shakespeare’s Globe. I recall the sheer incompetence of its Julius Caesar, in which the audience laughed out loud at the assassination of the title character and in which Brutus mangled the poetry.

Dominic Dromgoole, who now runs the Globe, had previously staged a Troilus and Cressida at the Old Vic that was probably the worse Shakespeare I ever saw, but I refused to stay after the interval and so have forgotten the rest. It was very badly spoken in coarse accents, the designs were ugly, and the play was simply incomprehensible. The rest is oblivion."

Do you find it harder to write a positive or negative review?

MC “It was easier, when I was younger, to be rude. I think it always is. I now find the pleasure of the job is writing something that approximates to the experience, good or bad. My one rule is to try and not bore myself in my writing, because then there's a chance you might entertain the readers.”

MB “A negative review, since one is consigning months of collaborative work to the rubbish dump.”

AM “The hardest reviews to write are often of productions that are neither bad nor good but of fair-to-middling, not very original, not very interesting, not actually bad, reasonable accounts of plays you have seen done better on previous occasions.

The positive/negative choice changes at different points in one’s career. When one is an angry young critic, it’s easier to write a negative review because it starts to compare itself in one’s head like an angry retort. Even now I’m in my fifties, any production that makes my angry is relatively easy to write about. But a production that bores me is harder to write about, and alas, it is easier to be bored when one has more experience.

When a production is wonderful, it is often hard to write about, because one wants not just to gush but to do it justice. But these are the reviews that make one most want to get writing, the reviews that remind one why one is a critic, the reviews that make one feel lucky to be in this job. I don’t feel I write my reviews for performers or directors or playwrights, but I have occasionally written letters to playwrights or actors or directors to say “Whether or not you read the reviews of this production, I want you to know that it is a production like this that makes me thrilled to do the job I do”. I think it is true that experience makes one choosier, but that it also deepens one’s pleasure in great work.”

What’s your own personal favourite of Shakespeare’s works?

MC “Favourite Shakespeare? Dead heat between A Winter's Tale and Twelfth Night.”

MB “Twelfth Night”

AM “Usually I agree with Tynan that the Henry IV plays are the best. And I was glad to find in 2005 that Nicholas Hytner agrees with me that Part 2 is yet better than Part 1. The co-existence of comedy and tragedy, of prose and poetry, of death and life was never more rich in all of Shakespeare.

But there are maybe a dozen that are equally dear to my heart. I have loved A Midsummer Night’s Dream since I was six or seven, and I still find it inexhaustible, especially in its multiple endings. (The play could end perfectly well with Bottom’s awakening, after all). I did Merchant of Venice for O-level and, in a range of professional productions I’ve watched since 1989, I have found it the Shakespeare play whose contours change the most between one production and another (and therefore the one that makes me especially grateful to be a critic). I did King Lear and Antony & Cleopatra for A-level and go on finding new things in them: Lear seems to me the tragedy of tragedies, Antony the play in which Shakespeare transcends tragedy.

Love’s Labour’s Lost was the first Shakespeare play of which I saw the same production more than once. This was the 1979 John Barton RSC staging: I saw it five times during one summer. It struck me then and long afterwards as the greatest Shakespeare production I had ever seen. I already knew the play and had seen it onstage, but this one came as a complete revelation: the play became a rapid-fire alternation of wit and pathos, of successive moments of Aristotelian peripatela and anagnorisis. I can never forget dozens of the moments delivered by Michael Pennington as Berowne, Jane Lapotaire as Rosaline, Richard Griffiths as the King, Carmen du Sautoy as the Princess, and Michael Hordern, David Suchet, Paul Brook and Allan Hendrick as Don Armado, Sir Nathaniel, Sir Holfernes, Costard. The scene where the four scholars eavesdrop on each other and then denounce each other was a triumph of comedy, ending up with all four on their backs with laughter – whereupon it was all suddenly trumped when the King said “But what of this? Are we not all in love?” and Berowne said “Aye, and thereby all forsworn” – at which point it felt as if a cloud passed across the sun and the laughter turned to sobriety in a trice. The disastrously performed play of the Nine Worthies was astounding, not just in its comedy but in the way the disconcerted actors rebuked the onstage audience. (Sir Holfernes: “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble”.) The news of the King of France’s death came simply as the biggest of a whole line of reversals throughout the play, the final lesson to stop the arrogant young scholars in their tracks, and it initiated the great and elegiac series of final wooings, climaxing with Rosalind’s stern lesson to Berowne. (“Why, that’s the way to choke a gibing spirit”.) Jack-hath-not-Jill was never more wonderful.

Watching that production, watching the Hall Antony & Cleopatra, watching the Hytner Measure for Measure, watching the Mendes Troilus and Cressida, watching the Noble Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, watching the Supple Comedy of Errors, watching the Boyd Midsummer Night’s Dream, watching the Boyd Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy, watching the Hytner Winter’s Tale, watching Sinead Cusack as Cleopatra, watching the Nunn/Whishaw Hamlet, watching the Hytner Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, I thought each time, “No, this is the greatest Shakespeare”. And I suppose I know now that Love’s Labour’s Lost is not the greatest. But the Barton production left me feeling it was the greatest for many years. It made me feel I knew the play inside out and that both play and playwright had been opened up to me when I was only twenty-four. And so I suppose it is for me – as I am glad to note it is for Harold Bloom too – my particular favourite.”

October 2005