Do fragile actors deserve a break from the poison pens of critics?

I read all the reviews,” actor Dominic West told Mishal Husain on the Today programme earlier this week, “and then spent two days in bed.” West had shown up at Radio 4, notionally, to discuss his upcoming appearance as Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, but the conversation drifted, magpielike, to his role as Prince Charles in Netflix’s The Crown. West’s comments made headlines, reopening a fractious debate about the role of critics in the arts, and whether they – which is to say, we – revel in our subjects’ misery.

The two seasons of Peter Morgan’s Elizabethan drama that West appeared in – its fifth and sixth outings – scored 71 per cent and 56 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, a site which aggregates responses from professional critics. This was significantly down from the highs of 95 per cent for the fourth chapter, but it hardly represents a pasting. It indicates that more than half of critics found something to like about The Crown’s conclusion. For my own part, while I didn’t think much of the show’s final season, I didn’t pass any judgement on West’s performance. The Crown’s problem has never been the quality of the acting (though I did once write that “West looks like he could beat the s*** out of Prince Charles”, which I suppose is a backhanded compliment at best).

All the same, the relationship between creatives and critics is a tricky one. On the one hand, it is a symbiotic relationship. Critics serve as the first line of curation, a filtration system that means viewers don’t have to taste-test the entire menu to find something edible. Most creatives (or, at least, their marketing and PR teams) understand this. They solicit reviews, availing early and privileged access to critics. There is an implicit understanding that, without attention from the press, the majority of shows will fizzle and die; and, conversely, without a constant flow of creative output, the art of criticism will wither on the vine.

But it’s an asymmetrical relationship, and not always a consensual one. We are less than a decade on from film director Alex Proyas’s legendary rant about critics. After his 2016 movie Gods of Egypt received a drubbing, Proyas called critics “a pack of diseased vultures pecking at the bones of a diseased carcass”. Expanding his vivid metaphor, Proyas wrote that they were attempting “to peck to the rhythm of consensus”. It’s not quite what Proyas intended, but vultures are not a bad metaphor for critics. A necessary, non-destructive part of the life cycle, which feasts best on the sort of art that can be roughly equated to carrion. Because let’s face it, most of the time a critic’s work is noticed, it’s because they’ve called bad art “bad art”.

It is always difficult to judge the impact of saying that something is bad. When Charles Burnett’s 1999 feature, The Annihilation of Fish, starring James Earl Jones, screened at the Toronto Film Festival it was ripped to shreds by Todd McCarthy in Variety. “It’s hard to imagine what the filmmakers were thinking when they put this project together,” McCarthy wrote. The distributor promptly cancelled the film’s release and it’s never been seen. But that is undoubtedly the more dramatic end of the spectrum: even if we hold onto the direct, personal criticisms forever (I can still remember being called "disruptive" by a year 4 maths teacher), most readers will have forgotten them by the next day. And, after all, The Annihilation of Fish will finally be released this year, following a 4K restoration. The air of mystery surrounding its critical assassination has only added to the intrigue.

But I sympathise with West and Burnett, because there is a human toll to public criticism. Most people – whether they’re painter-decorators, marine biologists, or regional managers for a paper supplier – must deal with negative professional feedback, which often feels like a burly man has kneed you directly in the gut. That experience is massively intensified when it’s enacted in the pages of a national newspaper. The Crown at least provides a collaborative medium to hide behind. The scrutiny is radically intensified for actors working on the stage. Think of the acclaimed screen actors who have headed to the West End in recent months – Catherine Tate in The Enfield Haunting, Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas in Lyonesse, Sarah Jessica Parker in Plaza Suite – only to experience the agonising glare of the critical spotlight. As Parker has learnt this week, when you’re one part of a two-hander, critics can’t just breezily move on to talking about Darren Star’s fizzy writing or Hugh Grant’s floppy hairdo. It’s a lonely place.

open image in gallery

And it can be a lonely place for critics too. There are no magazine covers, no million-dollar bonus checks, no black-tie awards ceremonies (at least, not ones that I’m invited to). But there is an endless stream of social media abuse, personal insults, and spurious death threats. In the increasingly partisan world of cultural consumption, most critics would feel a sense of dread about giving Taylor Swift a bad review, lest the Swifties come for them, or saying the wrong thing about a Star Wars, for fear of being doxed by the series’ very-online obsessives. Dominic West is right that there is a latent nastiness to the current discourse that makes honest and enlightening conversations about art increasingly hard to have.

All the same, West wasn’t actually appearing on the Today programme to talk about his bed-ridden anxieties. He was there to promote his new play and respond to comments he made during an interview back in November 2023. “You get a lot of tourists in London [theatre],” he had lamented to The Times, “and people are not necessarily there because they want to be there.” I’m sure that the audiences shelling out hundreds of pounds to see West onstage in the capital won’t be too upset by these criticisms, but it’s a salient reminder that both creatives and critics exist to serve an ultimate master: audiences.