Much gnashing of teeth has greeted the news of the early closure of the Phantom of the Opera sequel, Love Never Dies, and not simply from Andrew Lloyd Webber. It has been seen by many commentators, including David Lister in Saturday’s Independent, as symbolising a defeat for the professional critic. Despite some generally positive reviews from the professionals, Lloyd Webber’s latest production never seemed to recover from its early mauling at the hands of amateur critics on the internet.
There is an accepted principle in theatre-land that the professional critics don’t formally review a performance until all of the teething problems have been ironed out. Unfortunately, the amateur critics refuse to follow this convention, so reviews of Love Never Dies began to appear within hours of the opening performance. The professional critics joined the debate in an attempt to defend the primacy of their viewpoint compared to the uninformed opinions of bloggers, although their argument was somewhat undermined when it was discovered that a pun repeated by a number of eminent critics – ‘Paint never dries’ – actually originated from one of the amateur commentators.
Veteran critic Michael Coveney spoke for many in his profession when he suggested that, ‘Everyone is entitled to their opinion but it is not criticism.’ In his Guardian theatre blog David Cote made a typically valiant defence of his profession, even if the metaphor he used was rather untheatrical: ‘We critics, reviewers, consumer reporters – call us what you will – are the dung beetles of culture. We consume excrement, enriching the soil and protecting livestock from bacterial infection in the process. We are intrinsic to the theatre ecology. Eliminate us at your peril.’ There is little doubt that the dung beetles are fighting a losing battle against this type of evolutionary process.
To his credit, the Independent’s Lister appears very relaxed by ‘the democratisation of criticism’, suggesting that theatre billboards will increasingly feature positive blogs and tweets as well as the opinions of experts such as himself, although he doesn’t discuss where this leaves the professional critic. The fact that Variety magazine in the US has already dispensed with its chief film and theatre critics might indicate that his generation could be the last to wear the mantle of the professional critic.