Lebrecht on the demise of criticism, by way of linking to a piece at The Critic on the low state of UK theater criticism

Lebrecht links to a piece at The Critic about the end of an era in British theater criticism
https://slippedisc.com/2020/08/ed-of-the-line-for-the-nightly-critic/




https://thecritic.co.uk/the-end-of-an-era-in-british-theatre-criticism/

...

Theatre, in short, takes on what television and film rarely dare to – topical political polemics (Stuff Happens), the responsibility of scientists in a nuclear age (Copenhagen), the discussion of complicated ideas (Arcadia). It keeps alive the distant past in an amnesiac culture (from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare and Racine), and the recent past (Daldry’s revival of Wesker’s The Kitchen and Priestley’s An Inspector Calls). It tries to keep alive different kinds of language (from the lyricism of Jim Cartwright’s Road to Kushner’s Angels in America. It rejects insularity and parochialism, by bringing in productions from all around the world, from Mukiyama’s Japan to Jatinder Verma’s work with Tara Arts. 

Theatre does this in the face of an increasingly intolerant culture, which aches for the familiar and the parochial. In the 1890s, it was Archer and Shaw who championed Ibsenism. In the 1950s, Tynan and Hobson defended Beckett, Pinter and Brecht. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Billington, Nightingale and Peter defended The Romans in Britain and Bent. Today there is a real danger that editors, dumbing down, will look for new kinds of celebrity-critics, who know little and care less about theatre, who write badly and think timidly. Who, then, will champion the new and the bold, in an increasingly conformist climate? 

The passing of a golden age of theatre critics is symptomatic of the decline of the British press. It’s not just the circulations in complete free fall or the thinness of the new Guardian. It’s the middlebrow nature of arts pages, barely recognisable from twenty years ago. The New Statesman doesn’t even have a theatre critic any more. At a moment of crisis, British theatre has never needed the passionate and informed support of great theatre critics more, supported by editors who believe theatre matters.  

What television and film rarely dare to?  What a critic could do is explain how and why that would be the case.  I can hazard a guess that Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is a more articulate engagement of chaos theory, sight unseen, than the film The Butterfly Effect. 

As for film and metacritical engagement with art and art criticism, Brad Bird's Ratatouille is pretty mainstream and dealt with questions of artistic autonomy, social collaboration as a context for artistic activity, and the problems that arise when people attempt to define their identities in monolithic terms.  If theater critics in the United Kingdom don't tend to go into a viewing of a Pixar film looking for something "serious" then they won't find anything serious.  Ellul was acerbic when he wrote that the critic is the publicity agent for the arts but he has not been proven wrong.  If anything the emergence of a social justice warrior scene objecting to the reception histories that have made the Bard out to have an unassailable canonical role in English language theater, however marginal and even daft it might seem to established critics, could be the newest iteration of those willing to champion the new.  

To cycle this set of ideas back to Lebrecht's reaction to Phil Ewell, perhaps the perceived (or real) demise of British theater criticism could be taken alongside other teapot tempests Lebrecht has been writing about, such as the charge that Schenker's white supremacy should be kept alongside any teaching of his theory.  The death of Roger Scruton earlier this year sprung back to my mind and I remembered how in The Aesthetics of Music, Scruton laid out a fairly formidable case for why Schenkerian analysis is ultimately not a particularly useful methodology and is, instead, a kind of self-perpetuating system that presumes all good music is reducible to a I-V-I cadence. There will, eventually, be a post on Roger Scruton's thoughts on Schenkerian analysis.  That will take a while because Scruton did not say just a handful of things about the theory and it will take time to put that post together.  Think of the last few sentences as a preview of a post to come.

Years ago someone made the probably too witty observation that when old critics lament the death of art forms or the death of criticism they are not ultimately lamenting any death of an art or even of criticism of that art, they are indirectly grappling with the reality of their own mortality.