![Phoebe Waller-Bridge performs Fleabag](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2019/08/19/TELEMMGLPICT000206501241_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqkOwR0iP77jSmoq9t8DUmdq4V1sfPfy8vJY48JvVo2gM.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Fleabag wasn’t the first great work critics have snubbed – and it won’t be the last
![Phoebe Waller-Bridge performs Fleabag](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2019/08/19/TELEMMGLPICT000206501241_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqkOwR0iP77jSmoq9t8DUmdq4V1sfPfy8vJY48JvVo2gM.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Dominic Cavendish looks back at Phoebe Waller-Bridge's first-ever performance of Fleabag at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013. As of Monday 6 April 2020, the 2019 staged version of the show is available to stream for the first time on the Soho Theatre's On Demand streaming site
Phoebe Waller-Bridge's sold-out, last-hurrah run of Fleabag at Wyndham's Theatre last summer received adulatory reviews, from me included.
Those lucky enough to have bagged tickets will have enjoyed the original monologue in plusher conditions than in 2013 when her scabrous solo show first went before the critics in a musty Edinburgh vault.
Back then, while some offered admiration, only a few hailed a breakthrough, and none foresaw the ensuing cultural phenomenon.
Without wishing to name and shame, a notable handful were – in hindsight – remarkably grudging. “A tad contrived,” decided The Times. The Telegraph thought Fleabag’s narcissism grew “wearisome”, awarding three stars, while The Guardian, also handing out three stars, suggested: “Waller-Bridge hasn’t produced a flawless piece of writing.” Least prophetically, The Independent’s critic advised: “I doubt if this material will spin into a long-running radio or TV series.”
Ouch. The failure to recognise fully the merits of a show presented amid the hurly-burly of the Edinburgh Fringe hardly warrants catcalls ages after the event. Yet in an era when old reviews are easily found online, critics are more prone than ever to having their evaluations raked over.
But doesn’t part of theatre’s value lie in eliciting a range of subjective interpretations? Can we really say a critic got it wrong?
Sometimes the response is so dismissive in the face of the original work’s achievement that the exhumed commentary is fit mainly for mirth. Take the Financial Times’s 1960 verdict on The Sound of Music: “As a patriotic Englishman I devoutly hope my fellow Englishmen will reject this show emphatically. It is common and vulgar.”
!['It's just disgusting, it’s pathetic': Blasted](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2019/08/19/TELEMMGLPICT000002393178_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqM37qcIWR9CtrqmiMdQVx7MEYtNtmkn5vYU6P_GZtGuo.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Some of the broader failures of criticism for works later acknowledged as breakthrough achievements are more instructive. Indeed, negative notices serve to accentuate the virtues of the work being castigated. At the beginning of modern theatre, the 1891 premiere of Ibsen’s Ghosts in London was met with what critic William Archer called a “shriek of execration” from newspapers, the most forceful emanating from The Telegraph’s Clement Scott, who recoiled from “an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open…” The disapprobation elsewhere entailed similar Victorian expressions of physical and moral revulsion – a collective umbrage-taking at Ibsen’s feminist-minded laceration of unhappy marriages and societal hypocrisy, and his referencing of venereal disease.
Ghosts generated reams of coverage and made Ibsen a national talking point. Unbowed, he predicted the power of what became acknowledged as the first great tragedy written about middle-class people in prose. “All these fading and decrepit figures who have spat upon this work will one day bring upon their heads the crushing judgment of future literary historians… My book contains the future.” There’s a striking correlation between the critical opprobrium and the uncompromising resolve of the playwright to push against convention to lay bare an essential if unfamiliar truth.
The outrage at Ghosts found an echo a century later in the reaction to Sarah Kane’s Blasted in January 1995, a show that raced from the Royal Court to the front pages. While my predecessor Charles Spencer will likely be remembered for the risqué phrase (apropos a naked Nicole Kidman) “pure theatrical Viagra”, he has entered the annals too by joining the chorus of disapproval for Kane’s violent debut, since held as one of the defining plays of the Nineties.
“Blasted isn’t just disgusting, it’s pathetic,” he wrote. “Miss Kane may kid herself that she has written a searing indictment of Britain today. What she has actually produced is a lazy, tawdry piece of work without an idea in its head beyond an adolescent desire to shock.” Michael Billington of The Guardian was also moved to denounce what he saw: “I was simply left wondering how such naive tosh managed to scrape past the Court’s normally judicious play-selection committee.” He later conceded his error of judgment, as he did for Harold Pinter’s adultery-coiled Betrayal (1978), which distressed him for “its obsession with the tiny ripples on the stagnant pond of bourgeois-affluent life…”
![Claire Bllom and Richard Burton in rehearsals for Look Back in Anger in 1956](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2019/08/19/TELEMMGLPICT000206811033_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq9rg-P7f8wNnSS1PPckrMR3a-gXYaHdxKlabQ9q7NrEk.jpeg?imwidth=350)
The implication of there being less to Pinter’s play than met the eye was a throwback sentiment to the bafflement that greeted his London debut The Birthday Party (1958) – “His characters speak in non sequiturs, half-gibberish and lunatic ravings” (The Guardian).
The rise of the “permissive” society (and the end of stage censorship in 1968) led to a situation where sexually “immoral” behaviour didn’t trouble the high-minded reviewer, whereas insufficient artistic seriousness did. Kane was blasted, in effect, for seeming frivolous. A tendency in critics is to pronounce on what constitutes a fit subject for a play and they’re often wrong-footed in their assumptions. There are two supreme examples in the pivotal mid-20th century to illustrate the point – one is Samuel Beckett’s action-drained Waiting for Godot, the other John Osborne’s revolutionary kitchen-sink drama Look Back in Anger.
Of the former, in 1955, the Daily Mail spoke with irritated bewilderment: “The play comes to us with a great reputation among the intelligentsia of Paris. And so far as I am concerned the intelligentsia of Paris may have it back as soon as they wish.” The Evening Standard was equally quick to refuse the offer of Osborne’s far more accessible Royal Court debut a year later, which ushered in the era of the young articulate post-war malcontent: “It aims at being a despairing cry but achieves only the self-pitying snivel.”
Patronising flippancy – the sense that a discerning audience’s time is being wasted – is found in many dismissive notices from Edward Bond’s Saved (1965), which simulated the stoning of a baby (“Revolting if it wasn’t ridiculous” – The Sun) to Les Misérables (1985): “Tosh” (City Limits). Being a species of journalist, the critic is liable to rush a verdict under pressure of a tight deadline, be tempted by witty phrasemaking over dully dutiful appraisal and be hyper-vigilant against the coercions of publicity hype. Idiosyncrasy goes with the territory but if they fail to spot something that breaks the mould then they’re liable to become the laughing-stock of history.
For all the countless decent reviews that Scott wrote, he’s doomed to be known as the man who got Ghosts wrong. And it may be, as Waller-Bridge’s career progresses in leaps and bounds, that those who slighted her at the outset will have to wriggle uncomfortably for a considerable time. Otherwise engaged during her playwriting debut, I got off lightly. I suspect I would have been left open-mouthed by its pornographic blitheness and under-attentive to its formal daring.
Do I go to sleep confident that my rightful raves will save my reputation? Not a bit of it. I’m the man who derided both The 39 Steps and The Play That Goes Wrong and saw them becoming huge commercial successes, handed Olivier awards too.
If the next Ghosts hits, will I be its brave champion or its collateral damage? If I get it wrong, I can console myself with the thought that a play whose author has an eye to testing the value-system of the society they’re in – even with a view to altering it – should expect to provoke confusion, irritation, outrage and possibly injustice from critics. If not, then they too are not doing their job properly.