No one ever built a statue to a critic, they say – but plenty of art gets made about them. There was Wild Bore at the Traverse a few Edinburgh fringes back, an eye-catching performance-art attack on the notion of critical authority. There was Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, Sheridan’s The Critic, and the 70s horror movie (later a play) Theatre of Blood, in which critics are subjected to gruesome murder at the hands of a deranged thesp.
And while we’re talking unspeakable gore, one feature of Sarah Kane’s queasy play Cleansed, currently enjoying a revival, is that (in a wanton act of literary vengeance) its sadistic torturer antagonist is named after a theatre critic, Jack Tinker, who’d panned Kane’s work. Runts of the reviewing litter though we are, there’s even a sub-genre of art about comedy critics. The comic Russell Kane wrote a novel about one who was unable to laugh.
Ex-critic Charlotte Runcie wrote another about a journo giving a woman a one-star review for her standup, then sleeping with her. So there’s a precedent for the two shows on this year’s fringe that take comedy reviewing as their subject, one of them in direct response to so-so notices at last year’s festival. That show is Andrew Doherty’s Reviewers Welcome … to Die!
It’s a folk-horror spoof about an up-himself critic obliged by demons to learn the error of his ways. It springs from Doherty’s dismay at receiving a three-star crit (“one of the three worst scores you can get!”) for his sophomore show Sad Gay Aids Play – after critical hosannahs greeted his debut the year before. So where does Reviewers Welcome fall on the all-important five-star spectrum?
Happily, given that this is not a review, I am under no obligation to rate his show, which characterises those in my profession as preening, nepotistic snobs, scorning the talent they purport to judge while nursing their own thwarted artistic delusions. This happens at a fringe festival in the fictional Midlands town of Billington, a name that long-time readers of Guardian theatre reviews may recognise. All of this unfolds in the spoof scary-movie style familiar from Doherty’s hit Gay Witch Sex Cult, another Wicker Man-ish affair pitting a dopey outsider against yokel locals and dark forces beyond everyone’s ken.
Just as it trades in genre stereotype, so the show’s take on critics seldom outpaces cliche – although I did enjoy the closing gag about Chatelier’s constitutional inability to dole out that final, fifth star. But we critics get off lightly here, in that Reviewers Welcome is as much a mickey-take of thin-skinned artists bearing grudges as of those arbiters of taste who decorate or dismiss them with a swish of our pen. And now to the second show.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
