Artist vs critic: a play without direction

Peter Popham is far from entertained by the latest episode in the longest-running story in showbusiness

It was one of the saddest, most inept exhibitions of rage that it has been this critic's misfortune to witness. When Michael Bogdanov persuaded the New Statesman to lend him two pages of the current issue in which to vent his spleen against the critics who mauled his production of Faust, hopes were high. Bogdanov, director of such great movies as The Last Picture Show but popularly known among London critics as "the Bodger" for the uneven quality of his theatrical work, had every advantage - no terrifyingly tight deadline, plenty of space, and above all, the priceless asset of genuine rage. But he went and blew it.

First gaffe - an opening paragraph dripping with self-pity. "Directing is a lonely affair," he sniffles. "Six months of tortuous preparation can go up in smoke in a couple of hours." Boo hoo. But this was meant to be a boxing match, not a weepie.

Second howler - having been well trailed on the cover ("Michael Bogdanov beats up the theatre critics"), Bogdanov bizarrely confounds expectations by turning critic himself, berating "the anal, pedantic obsession of... Peter Stein... the embarrassing naivete of Peter Brook's Hamlet..." If he's so happy dishing it out, one is obliged to ask, what problem does he have with taking it?

Bogdanov's final self-inflicted upper cut consists in tossing out a random string of disagreeable adjectives to describe the critic he hates most - "vicious, vituperative, vitriolic, objectionable, abusive, arrogant", etc etc - but declining to name him. He thereby allows his presumed target, Charles Spencer, theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph, to deliver a single knockout punch - the word 'cowardly' - and raise his arms in victory.

This is the usual outcome of such encounters. The war of the artist and the critic is as old as self-expression itself, but it has always been an unfair fight.

The writer and his actors may command the action on stage, but as soon as the house lights go up, the critic, "a bunch of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste", as someone put it, takes the floor and holds it for as long as he likes. "His style is chaos, illuminated by flashes of lightning. As a writer, he has mastered everything except language; as a novelist, he can do everything except tell a story; as an artist, he is everything except articulate." (Oscar Wilde on George Meredith). "I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up," said Groucho Marx. Dorothy Parker on Tolstoy's Redemption: "I went into the theatre a comparatively young woman, and I staggered out of it three hours later, 20 years older, haggard and broken with suffering."

Oh, very good, very droll - unless you happen to be on the wrong end of it. If you are Stephen Fry and Nicholas de Jongh has described your performance as "Stephen Fry does his usual Stephen Fry impersonation of a superior man-servant" - pretty mild stuff - you will flee the country for six months as the only alternative to suicide. But the more robust reaction is to seek revenge.

The way you get it depends very much on the sort of person you are. Bogdanov's response clearly shows he is a closet man of letters, though the New Statesman piece will not have advanced his literary reputation much. Steven Berkoff, on the other hand, cultivates the image of a heavy, as when he approached ex-Guardian theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh in a restaurant and said, "Hello, Nicholas - I am going to kill you." When de Jongh tried to make a joke of it, Berkoff said, "No, you don't understand; I am going to kill you." So far, however, de Jongh remains alive.

For some reason, Guardian critics seem particularly vulnerable to personal assault. Michael Billington was biffed about the head by David Storey after Billington labelled his play Mother's Day "a stinker". Opera critic Tom Suttcliffe got a glass of red wine in the face from a furious soprano, and de Jongh was once doused in ginger beer by someone he dismissed as a "lorry-driving lesbian."

It is tempting to wring hands and conclude that the triviality of the age has reduced both critics and the artists they lambast to thugs - tempting, but wildly wrong. Back in the 1950s, Kenneth Tynan's elegant put-down of the absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco may have stimulated a wonderfully unEnglish debate involving some of the most superb intellects in the land and going on for weeks. But it was in the same decade that John Osborne formed what he called the British Playwrights' Mafia, whose object was beating up critics (though they never did more than fire off rude postcards).

So what can the luckless artist do? Perhaps the only satisfactory response is to drag the offending individual out of the auditorium and stick him on the stage. It's an old trick - Aristophanes did it to both Euripides and Aeschylus, and Plato went and did it to Aristophanes. Some years later, George Lucas did it to the terrifying New York film critic Pauline Kael, naming the villain in Star Wars General Kael. Over here, Simon Gray named the murder victims in his TV play Old Flames Wardle, Shulman, Nightingale and Coveney, after the theatre critics. It doesn't stop the bastards having the last word. But it's the closest the playwright's going to get to sticking pins in a voodoo doll.