C'est la Guerre - as the critics would say

For Sir Cameron Mackintosh it became a case of "nice party, shame about the show".

There could be no complaints about the pounds 150,000 bash complete with fire- eaters, fairground entertainments, a roast boar on a spit and unlimited champagne in London's Bedford Square. But the morning after was not so kind to Britain's best-known impressario. He awoke to find that his pounds 3.5m blockbuster Martin Guerre, arriving with pounds 3m-worth of advance bookings and unlimited hype, had failed to set the critics alight.

"It's not magnifique but c'est le Guerre," punned the Daily Telegraph as their critic concluded that "the result is a terrible tendency to humourless portentousness in both music and script." Others were not so kind.

It may be little consolation to Sir Cameron, but as bad reviews go these are only minor examples of the genre.

There is nothing to compare with a real honest-to-God stinker. It is an art-form in itself, delighting readers, making a critic's name and even, perversely, encouraging theatre-goers to see the show. It even provoked a book when Dame Diana Rigg published a collection of stinkers down the ages under the memorable title No Turn Unstoned. She knew what she was talking about. Her nude appearance in Abelard and Eloise was described by an American critic thus: "Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses."

Of course, such reviews can increase one's eagerness to see the show. Who would have missed seeing Vivien Leigh raped on the ground in Titus Andronicus after the notice which remarked that her mildly irritated expression suggested she would prefer to have been ravaged on Dunlopillo?

Some of the genre's bon mots have passed into theatrical history. Dorothy Parker's review of a play called The Lake in 1933 was the exquisitely bitchiest ever written: "Go to the Martin Beck Theatre and watch Katherine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B."

The ultimate King Lear review was given at the end of the last century when a critic remarked that the leading actor "played the king as if someone else had already played the ace". But this was trumped by that incomparable model of economy in the review of Isherwood's I Am A Camera which read in its totality: "Me no Leica."

There are ways of countering a stinker. The most effective is to prove the critics wrong by trusting the public to back your judgement. Sir Cameron has done exactly this in the past. His production of Les Miserables was hammered when it opened in 1985. But the public loved it and it continues to draw crowds around the world.

And there are extreme measures that the victim of a stinker can take. Sadly, as a knight of the realm, Sir Cameron is unlikely to take a leaf out of the actor Steven Berkoff's book. When his Hamlet received a stinker from Nicholas De Jongh in the Guardian, Berkoff responded like a true aesthete. He threatened to kill him: a threat taken so seriously that the newspaper afforded De Jongh police protection.

And just occasionally the stinker can come from the thespians themselves. WS Gilbert's stock phrase when visiting actors backstage was: "My dear fellow, good isn't the word!" A model of subtlety compared to Groucho Marx's "I didn't like the play but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up."

One of my favourite unpublished theatrical stories is of Dame Maggie Smith when she starred in a flop by a well-known playwright. The playwright went backstage afterwards to chat to Dame Maggie; but she merely glared at him and refused to reply to any of his pleasantries. Eventually, trembling, he made his excuses saying: "I must go home now, I'm struggling with a new play."

At this Dame Maggie finally spoke. "AREN'T WE ALL!" she thundered magisterially as she closed the door on his shaking back.

See review, page 6, Section Two.