Critics
They come and go
The Critic by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Someone wants to put on a play and because this is a comedy, it’s the worst play in the world. The worst play it is possible to conceive of, the worst it is possible to imagine.
And someone wants to criticise a play; and so he is the worst critic it is possible to imagine: vain and stupid and easily conned. Pompous and self-obsessed. Beyond hope. Apt to be tricked, to make himself the fool. And there are two of him. It’s like Stoppard, centuries before Stoppard.
And this is Sheridan we are talking about, let it be in no doubt. The man who, when the theatre at Drury Lane – which he owned – was ablaze and burning and apt to fall down (bankrupting its proprietor), continued drinking port, saying that it is a fine thing to have a glass of wine at one’s own fireside. So of course, of course, it is going to be funny. It is going to be funny, this play about the absurdities of the theatre.
The absurdities. Like the truth universally known that you can easily get a hand, easily get people crying manly and noble tears, at the vaguest, the stupidest possible, patriotic reveries. That they in the stalls laugh when there is not a joke being told on stage, but do not recognised a good bit of wordplay when it slaps them hard in the face. That the people in the boxes and the dress circle are too busy carrying on their flirtations and their conversations to pay what’s happening on the boards the slightest notice.
How it is all, ultimately, for nothing – nothing except itself, nothing except amusement. The amusement of the participants, and the few who pay attention. And we all need amusement at times, don’t we?
Other Sheridan plays might be more famous and they might be considered better studies of the absurd in human nature; but I am not an intelligent man and, personally, I enjoy silly names. Naturally, a writer so keen on spouting heroic drivel is called Mr Puff.
And naturally a great pompous, larger-than-life, vainer-than-a-debutante theatrical personage entirely convinced of his own genius, his own stature, is Sir Fretful Plagiary. Who is mistakenly invited by Mr Puff to see a ridiculous historical play (not yet finished!). A play on some great national crisis or other, in which the good men are so good they are unbearable, and the tragedy (oh, the humanity!) lies thick as tarmac, ladled over everything by the foolish writer.
And I like the theatre critics who are Dangle and Sneer; and I like it that their tastes are so universally the tastes of the critics throughout the ages. They want something worthy that they can blame the public for not getting. They want something so boring that they can call others who are not sitting through it for cash lazy and impatient and lacking in cultivation.
And as the two critics wonder of a playwright possibly adapting for drama ‘the penal laws’, we know who they are sending up. The whole repertoire of socially or politically ‘committed’ playwrighting by some deeply mediocre people in our own lifetimes. It is of that we inevitably think.
Watch out, Ken Loach! Someone long dead has your number.
And Sir Fretful Plagiary has many long, meandering speeches that would not disgrace an Oscar night and would not upset the most recent awardees at the Oliviers. And he thinks his own work is so terribly important and tremendously contemporary.
He does not say his work is urgent and stark and necessary, that it tell us all so very much about the way we live now – but only because so many of the deeply boring people who now say that kind of thing were not born in the late eighteenth century.
While modern critics argue among themselves about why theatre ought to be tedious and miserable and nationally and culturally self-abnegating – and why it ought to make people leave their seats sad and bitter, so they can argue about what they saw on the bus or train journey home – it’s good, every so often, to remember that once there were people alive who are funnier than us. And they thought the whole thing was a joke.