Two Edinburgh fringe shows feature savage send-ups of reviewers. Is this petty revenge or do they have a case? Our writer finds one ‘a hoot’ – and thinks the other let him off lightly
No one ever built a statue to a critic, they say – but plenty of art gets made about them. There was Wild Bore at the Traverse a few Edinburgh fringes back, an eye-catching performance-art attack on the notion of critical authority. There was Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, Sheridan’s The Critic, and the 70s horror movie (later a play) Theatre of Blood, in which critics are subjected to gruesome murder at the hands of a deranged thesp. And while we’re talking unspeakable gore, one feature of Sarah Kane’s queasy play Cleansed, currently enjoying a revival, is that (in a wanton act of literary vengeance) its sadistic torturer antagonist is named after a theatre critic, Jack Tinker, who’d panned Kane’s work.
Runts of the reviewing litter though we are, there’s even a sub-genre of art about comedy critics. The comic Russell Kane wrote a novel about one who was unable to laugh. Ex-critic Charlotte Runcie wrote another about a journo giving a woman a one-star review for her standup, then sleeping with her.
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