How do people react to bad reviews? Everyone working in the arts has his or her solution. But one of the more extreme examples has just occurred at the Manchester international festival. Seemingly miffed by the poor reception for Neck of the Woods, which he directed, the Turner prize winner Douglas Gordon took an axe to a concrete wall of the Home arts centre where the play is running. Not only that: he left a signed doodle of a wolf’s paw as a reminder that the play is an updated version of Little Red Riding Hood. Unsurprisingly, he has been presented with a repair bill for the damage.
People who, unlike Gordon, are used to the rough-and-tumble of theatre tend to be more philosophical about bad reviews. But there have been one or two striking examples of retaliation against critics. The most famous was that of the playwright and actor Steven Berkoff, who once threatened to kill Nicholas de Jongh after a savage review. “I did it to turn him on,” said Berkoff in a recent interview. He was also, it should be said, one of the first to send a letter paying tribute to De Jongh after the latter’s departure as Evening Standard drama critic. But although it may have been a mischievous joke, the Berkoff death threat didn’t seem so at the time, and De Jongh’s editor asked for his critic to receive police protection.
I too was once at the sharp end of a physical rebuke. Donkey’s years ago I described an early play of David Storey, Mother’s Day, as “a stinker”. The play was on at the Royal Court and a week or so later I was back in the building to review another new play at the Theatre Upstairs. In those days the only access to the studio theatre was via the Royal Court bar and who should be standing there, awaiting the critics, but the burly figure of David Storey, an ex-rugby league player. Storey admonished my colleagues verbally but proceeded to cuff me on the back of the head, like an old-fashioned schoolmaster. I thought no more about it but the incident was spotted, reported in the papers and blown up into a “writer attacks critic” story as if I’d been felled by Muhammad Ali. It was all pretty silly but it did no lasting damage to my professional relationship with Storey.
Mostly, however, artists get their own back on critics verbally rather than physically. John Osborne was famous, when a practising playwright, for dispatching abusive postcards after particularly bad reviews. But what I find fascinating is that it is directors – and this links in with the Douglas Gordon episode – who get more worked up than writers or actors. I treasure a postcard from Jonathan Miller that, after I’d dismissed a Shakespeare production of his, asked me to cease my “foul pork-scratchings”. Dominic Dromgoole, soon to step down from a successful decade running Shakespeare’s Globe, was famous for sending barbed missives to critics. Trevor Nunn was another inveterate letter writer who seemed to think he could force one to revise an opinion by sheer weight of words.
I can understand the urge to retaliate, not least because I once saw the devastating impact a bad review can have. Some years ago I directed a Pinter-Strindberg double bill at the Battersea Arts Centre. Reviewing the show in the Guardian, Adrian Noble attacked not just me, which was fair enough, but a brilliant female actor who had precisely followed my instructions. She was devastated, and I remember I had to use all my powers of persuasion to coax her back on to the stage for the second performance. Reviews, I realise, can hurt.
I still believe, however, that the best answer to them is not to take an axe either to the building or to the critic concerned – but to do one’s best to maintain a dignified silence.
