Please believe the hype: John Simm in Elling. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
My memory may be playing tricks on me - so do please correct me if I'm wrong - but I think it was Alan Bennett who once suggested that theatre critics are like a group of giddy chorus girls out for a night on the town and just waiting to be fucked. I can't say I've ever felt much like a giddy chorus girl (I have neither the figure nor the disposition), but there certainly are times when I feel like a bit of a cheerleader, even if I don't look like one.
I was thinking about it earlier this week as I wrote my review for the blissfully funny Elling at the Bush, starring John Simm from Life on Mars. Even as I was writing, I was aware that I had a silly grin all over my face. I just loved it to bits. The last time I felt quite like that at the Bush was watching the premiere of Beautiful Thing years ago. I'm clearly not alone in my enthusiasm for Elling. "There is no better theatrical tonic in town," declared Nicholas de Jongh. "Something rare and special," said Charlie Spencer.
What I wonder is if, two weeks from now, someone who read these rave reviews will come out of Elling and go: "What on earth were they all talking about? It's good, but not that great. Did the Bush put happy pills in the Chardonnay on press night?" I ask because quite frequently I come out of the theatre thinking those things myself. As I'm a second-string theatre critic, I often find myself on a train in a remote part of the UK while many of my colleagues are reviewing closer to home. So I have a lot of catching up to do.
I'm already at the theatre five nights a week, so that doesn't leave too many evenings free. And I do like to check in with my children now and again to reassure myself that they are still alive and haven't grown up in my absence and left home. So I try to choose carefully. And just like the average newspaper reader, other critics' rave reviews are my guide. I can't tell you how often I come out disappointed. Tim Supple's Indian Midsummer Night's Dream? I liked the paper set and the acrobatics, and Titania was genuinely sexy, but I don't think it justified all those five-star writeups. Maybe it was better in India? Or in Stratford? It certainly wasn't a five-star show in an echoing, half-empty Roundhouse. Alan Bennett's The History Boys? I know this is heresy and I'll be kept back for detention, but I found it a mite dull and predictable. Certainly not Bennett's best. John Gabriel Borkman at the Donmar? I loved David Eldridge's new version, and it had some of my favourite actors in it, but am I the only person who thought the performances a touch histrionic?
Critics, of course, get to see shows first and there is a huge difference between going to see a show with no expectations and going to see one with high expectations. Almost inevitably, the latter is a bit of a letdown. There are very few shows that live up to their hype. But the truth is that the opinions of a gaggle of theatre critics are less reliable than the opinion of one who you regularly read and whose taste and sensibility you've come to know and share - or even one whose taste and sensibility you are confident you entirely distrust. At this moment, there will be Guardian readers besieging the Shaw Theatre's box office quite correctly knowing that if I loathed Menopause the Musical, they will love it. That is how it should be.
I think that Dominic Droomgole gets it right in the afterward of his brilliant, outspoken book The Full Room, which dares to says the unsayable. Droomgoole suggests that "our aesthetic is almost our last way of understanding ourselves" and argues that theatre is "too precious a resource to be spoiled by opinions, especially those of others ... see what you see, and if you love it, love it and if you don't, don't big time. Bring all that you have to the occasion, whatever clumps of elegance or sewage that have stuck to you along the way but let it be your elegance and your sewage, no one else's."
