[This essay was originally published in The Listener, August 25, 1983.]

James Fenton's nature doesn't appear to be vindictive, though wiser playwrights would run miles from such a risk as I now take. I declare my interest: two of my plays have been the subject of his comments. Those for Caritas I'd heard were not favourable and did not read. The practice of the craft is pain enough without subjecting oneself to the cruel ephemerality of a reviewer's opinion. When I've written this I'll read it and add a postscript. Those for Annie Wobbler, my latest play, were generous.

Criticism is crucial to democracy. So crucial it must be checked and weighed and constantly open to counter-criticism. Assembling one's critical opinions after only four years may seem like immodest haste to claim posterity's attention, but four years is four years. The problem of evaluating theatre is that no one dares make, or quite knows, the distinction between the lovely lady, showbiz, and the embarrassing slut, art. Criteria become jumbled. 'You were marvellous' is a showbiz expression. It does not reflect Mr Fenton's serious criteria. Where are we?

The cosy argument is that artists hate criticism. Not true. We are relentlessly self-critical, and most of us have at least one acerbic friend whose criticism is invaluable. Criticism from colleagues involved in theatre is constant up to and beyond first nights. The Penguin editions of my plays are full of changes.

Newspaper reviews, on the other hand, render the artist victim of a dangerous deception for which I know no remedy. It can only be identified. The nature of the deception is this: reviews are merely individual opinions whose importance is magnified out of proportion by print, which has magic properties and carries awesome authority. Like a teacher's report. Teachers must always be right, they've been appointed. The child can only ever be wrong.

Fenton, in his postscript [to You Were Marvellous,] honestly concedes the possibility of being, and claims the right, to be wrong. It's disarming. But jejune. 'We must be true to our anger, true to our enthusiasms, true to our excitement, true to our boredom,' he insists. It can only ever be a half-truth. Behind his anger, his enthusiasm, his etc., etc. is the Sunday Times. We are not pitted only against him but against an institution. Reviewers like to delude themselves they have a public who trusts them. But did anyone change papers because Fenton took over from Levin?

There's more to the deception. Aware of it or not, the public regards artistic activity as presumptuous. Unfavourable reviews play to their gallery. Artists acclaimed by time are safer. Living ones work in a continual state of original sin from which only a good review can redeem them. They're a kind of criminal; the public must be protected. The reviewer is St George, print his sword! The reader, who thrills to a good thrashing, is on his side before he begins.

If artists feel a depressing sense of injustice confronted by an adverse review, it's not because they've been criticised but because they've been criticised humiliatingly in public by an overwhelming institution whose sleight of hand appears to deal, omnipotently, in 'the truth', and against which they have no appeal.

A story illustrates my point. [My play] Caritas had just opened. At a friend's house I met an elderly, cultured woman I'd met before. We usually discussed theatre and she'd confide how much she admired my work. I didn't need to ask had she seen my new play, I told her she hadn't. 'It was because of Fenton's bad review wasn't it?' I added. She apologetically confessed I was right. 'But why,' I asked her in despair, 'why did you trust him rather than me?' I reminded her how often she'd told me she'd admired my work. 'Why didn't you give me the benefit of the doubt after 25 years of writing?' She mumbled something about 'he wrote in such a way that I felt it wasn't for me'. She could have had no idea of the helpless, dispirited feeling with which she left me.

Two problems attend the reading of an entire collection of theatre reviews in one go. First, you need to have seen the productions to measure the opinions offered. Criticism of a play frequently bears little relationship to the experience of it. Second, to have the critical note ringing in your head without the pauses of living, loving and laughing is a kind of torture, like the water-drip. Reading only one a week, it's possible to recognise Mr Fenton as a normal, intelligent human being with opinions like other normal, intelligent human beings, sometimes persuasive, witty, well written, other times not. He's informed, seems to take more trouble than duty calls for, has winning breathless enthusiasms, and pure hatreds like other normal, intelligent human beings.

And this is why we despair. It is just another opinion; as intelligent or flawed as those of countless acquaintances. The sense of injustice comes from knowing one is condemned not on merit but by the accident of A's appointment rather than B's.

In my opinion Fenton missed the intention of Amadeus which, as a self-confession of mediocrity and a hymn of praise to genius, makes it a far more interesting and moving work than he perceived. (And I write as someone who doesn't normally respond to Shaffer's kind of theatre.) He was right to applaud Duet For One, and to come away depressed from Cats; but he was uninteresting about Barton's distressing Merchant of Venice, and did not achieve in his review of The Greeks what his introduction claims was his intention: a record of the production's details. I disagree with this opinion, agree with the other. So what?

Few who work in the theatre rate a reviewer's opinions. They care only to survive the new round of unsubstantiated, shorthand comment rushed and subbed and laced with human fallibility. When asked whether they are pleased with good reviews, they reply 'Relieved, rather.' They've lived with a production at such proximity that they know it for its real strengths and weaknesses. Reviewers confuse sentiment for sentimentality, and declare something doesn't work when they mean they don't share its intellectual or moral assumptions. Or don't understand them! They miss subtleties of structure, speech rhythms, textural patterns, ironies, echoes, links, the way actors and directors can either betray a text's intentions or, through cunning directoral manipulation, give text a substance it doesn't possess. Theatre people can damn and praise their work far more accurately.

Mr Fenton declares: Critics unite! 'In order to begin work, we need the right to be wrong, the right to be unfair, the right to be overenthusiastic.' But at whose expense? And what curious reasoning claims 'the right to be unfair'? It rings bravely but I hear the tiniest crackle of sententiousness. A year to write a play, a year before it's produced, then those unassailable reviews claiming the right to be unfair. Two years of work wiped out, two years more to wait. Such considerations cannot be dismissed as 'tough luck—that's showbiz.' Livelihoods, cracked confidence, pain are involved. Each time a new, young critic takes over we brace ourselves fearing he is going to flex his muscles on us, beat a drum calling the crowds' attention—'Over here! over here!' Mr Fenton must be aware he's doing more than simply exercising his right to be wrong when he writes of Shaffer: 'Mozart is depicted in an offensive and banal way because he is seen through the eyes of a very, very bad dramatist indeed—perhaps the worst serious English dramatist since John Drinkwater.' Could he cross his heart and deny that one tiny part of his ego rubbed its hands together, smacked its lips and murmured: 'That'll make 'em sit up'? Postscript. I've read Mr Fenton's review of Caritas. It is a very illuminating case history of misreading. I have a theory that if you tell people what they're reading, that is what they'll read. Tell them here is a play by Wesker and they'll find what they imagine is to be expected of Wesker. I recently wrote a bawdy comedy which was sent to managements as the work of a Cambridge professor of philosophy. Responses reflected what they'd been told. Similarly Mr Fenton seems to have an image of me as a certain kind of writer.

Caritas is about an anchoress who asks to be immured, hoping for a pure life of divine revelation. She finds she has no vocation for such a life, begs release, is denied it and goes mad. 'Caritas is extremely badly written,' says Mr Fenton. I say it is extremely well written. More, in view of the misery of young people inextricably attached to fanatical notions which have imprisoned them, I think Caritas as a metaphor for self-delusion is also an important play. Who is to be believed? After a quarter of a century writing plays (directing and viewing them too) it is just possible I knew at least as much about it as Mr Fenton. How could readers decide? His review acted as a kind of censor to the play. Criticism of critics reads sourly. Self-defence involves immodest assertions. Catch 22.

Asking 'What was Mr Wesker after?' Fenton, unwaveringly confident—and why shouldn't he be? there was no one to challenge him—replies: 'The answer is only too clear from the text … an image of repression.' He expected me to be writing about repression and that's what he saw. The text is only too clearly about a girl who asks to be immured, not who is forced into it. The image is of self-imprisonment. Setting it against the background of the Peasants' Revolt I was choosing not another 'image of repression' but, again as the text clearly states, another image of self-destruction. Both the anchoress and the peasants sought worthy ends, both betrayed those ends through excess, dogma, fanaticism. Mr Fenton, still blinded by his preconceptions, suggested I changed the setting from Surrey to Norfolk in search of 'grittiness'. Readers cannot be expected to know my connections with Norfolk through marriage, Roots, The Wedding Feast; a responsible theatre critic should. I knew one dialect, not the other. 'He has obviously done very little research.' Why does Mr Fenton assume so? He doesn't know me. He didn't ask. In fact I researched it in great detail, as my many notebooks testify. All art is selection. He means he doesn't respond to what I decided to put in and leave out. He should say so. Insults diminish the value of his opinions…. This is not only a defence of my play; such a case-history enables us to evaluate Mr Fenton's reliability as a reviewer. Other playwrights could no doubt put similar cases.

Dear Mr Fenton, I concede your right to be wrong (though not unfair, come, come, sir!), even to be paid for it. But be aware others pay a hidden price for your luxury. The life of a play is postponed, a bank overdraft grows, time is wasted recovering. Caritas is one of my most original plays. Years must pass before it can be reevaluated. Many of us work hard, seriously, responsibly. We take risks, we treat our audiences intelligently, prod their laughter at rich rather than facile levels. These reviews, whatever the lapses, reveal a responsible intelligence that we need to encourage us to continue taking risks. Don't go into competition with us or demean yourself with pyrotechnic insults. And remember, we have to continue working after you have become bored with our art … and have moved on to other interests.