Sir, – I rather enjoyed Peter Crawley's distinctly negative review of my play Francis Frances(Culture, June 15th) as it clearly got under his skin, and he equally clearly didn't "get it" but I have patiently waited until the play's run was finished before responding to his comments.
Obviously any critic should be absolutely free to voice his or her opinion, but surely they also have a duty to be a) accurate and b) to record the audience’s response? Mr Crawley’s responses were both inaccurate and quite remarkably literal. To give but one example, his comments on the music used in the play are a) that it was “bafflingly reliant on classic TV theme tunes” and then b) he asks if Bacon (the subject of the play) “was really a Rawhide fan?” My play did not use the Rawhide theme; and far from it being reliant on TV theme tunes, it used only three out of more than 50 music cues. Bafflingly reliant? Even if there had been a Rawhide track, your reviewer’s inference that I was stating that Bacon was supposed to have liked the music in the play is not only literally-minded, but engagingly daft.
As it happens, the use of music in the play has elicited considerable comment from the audience (all of it favourable) and audience members, whether under 20 or over 70, whether academic or from the arts community, seem to have had no difficulty in understanding that that the music has been used variously as a) emotional underpinning b) ironic counterpoint c) period context d) as a distancing technique, much in the manner of Kubrick's use of music in A Clockwork Orangeand e) as a way of using the associations that pop and rock have for an older audience to help them relate to otherwise very dark sexual, psychological and political subject matter. On the night your reviewer came we had a packed house and a highly enthusiastic audience who clearly enjoyed the humour, the music, and the unusual form of storytelling.
As someone who has reviewed regularly for more than 30 years (even in this newspaper), I am aware that two of the basic duties of a reviewer are to report accurately on a play, and, especially when one has a negative view, to record the audience’s reactions. It seems odd that, at a time when playwrights are being encouraged in the press to deal with serious and challenging subjects – in this case the problems of being homosexual; the relationship between aberrant sexuality and art; the politics of identity; and the ethics of a “genius” misusing those around him – the response is to ignore the serious subject matter and ignore the audience’s very positive response.
Your reviewer even complains about the lack of plot, seemingly unaware that everything from medieval miracle and morality plays through to Beckett's Waiting for Godotdispensed with plot as a structuring device. There are other ways of writing plays but your reviewer seems to want all of us to return to the days of boulevard theatre. I don't necessarily expect an audience to be theatrically literate but I do expect a reviewer to be capable of working out what a professional writer is up to! – Yours, etc,