When the Spotlight Turns Red: Artists, Critics, and the Ancient Sport of Taking Offence

There’s a peculiar hush that settles over a rehearsal room when the first reviews drop. Performers feign nonchalance, stage managers pace in circles, and directors grip their phones as though they’re defusing bombs. Every so often the verdict is euphoric, but more often – as surely as curtain-up follows half-hour – somebody, somewhere, declares the production a turkey. What comes next can be uproariously funny, faintly tragic or downright vicious, depending on the temperament of the wounded party.

Consider the now-mythic Broadway tale of an Oscar-nominated actor who tipped steak tartare and brie onto a New York critic after he likened her social life to serial gate-crashing. Or the comic songwriter who retaliated to a one-star notice with a brand-new musical number, littered with playground insults and a grisly wish upon the critic’s relatives. Neither episode added lustre to anyone’s artistic résumé, yet both live on – gleefully retold – as green-room morality plays.

I write this as a woman who spends her days weighing artistic merit for publication, and I’ve tasted every flavour of backlash. I’ve been cheerfully mocked on stage for months, dissected in midnight e-mails, and called unprintable things by Hollywood marketing departments. The fiercest reprisals rarely come from bona-fide A-listers; more often it’s the mid-career hopeful, sensing fragile prospects slipping away, who lashes out with theatrical fury.

Bruising verdicts can, and do, wound. Collective critical derision helped turn the recent cinematic adaptation of Cats into a litter-tray-sized box-office calamity, while tepid notices in New York reportedly nudged an Elton John musical off Broadway within a week. Closer to home, a ballet director was suspended after smearing canine excrement on a journalist’s face for daring to label his work dull. The police were called; the maestro’s choreography was forgotten. Proof, if any were needed, that lines get crossed far beyond the wings.

Yet critical drubbings aren’t always fatal. The Great Gatsby met polite shrugs in 1925 and now anchors school syllabuses. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one-woman monologue premiered in Edinburgh to modest nods, only to become a global television juggernaut. The arithmetic is maddeningly inconsistent: sometimes reviews matter; sometimes they dissolve in the slipstream of public affection. Hurling abuse at the messenger rarely changes those odds.

Why, then, do artists keep doing it? In part because their work is personal in a way most office jobs aren’t. A novelist spends years alone with a manuscript; an actor bleeds private emotion eight shows a week. When that labour is distilled into two dismissive paragraphs, it can feel like a mugging. Add exhaustion, financial risk and brittle egos, and you have perfect conditions for theatrical thunderclaps.

Technology tightens the vice. In the print era a savage notice was tomorrow’s chip-paper; now it’s searchable for eternity. Star ratings appear on phones before the house lights dim. One provincial troupe, affronted by a perfectly respectable three-star verdict, printed badges urging audiences not to emulate the critic. The badge became a bigger story than the review – proof that grievance travels faster than reason.

There’s also a perverse symbiosis at play. Critics need material; artists crave attention. Vincent Gallo and Roger Ebert volleyed insults for years over The Brown Bunny, each new barb gifting the other fresh headlines. Uwe Boll, derided for bargain-bin gore, literally boxed his harshest reviewers in a YouTube spectacle. Everyone won column inches; nobody won the moral high ground.

So where should the boundary lie? Freedom of expression allows critics to call it as they see it, just as it permits artists to clap back – ideally sans bodily fluids, livestock waste or doxxed relatives. Some comebacks are ingenious: spoof posters, rewritten lyrics, badges that lampoon without wishing tragedy on anyone’s family. Sharp wit always lands harder than blunt rage.

For reviewers – myself included – responsibility starts with recognising that livelihoods hinge on a few lines of copy. A jab at a performance is fair game; an attack on appearance or private life is lazy. The best criticism interrogates its own biases, tempers hyperbole with evidence and leaves room for audiences to disagree.

Artists, meanwhile, might benefit from the long view. History brims with creative triumphs that outlived their detractors. A rash response can brand a career far longer than a mediocre star count. The Spanish theatre-maker who bared all and denounced a French critic now grapples with defamation suits; the Hanover choreographer is better known for canine vengeance than choreographic innovation. Hardly the legacy most performers crave.

None of this absolves critics from the need for empathy, nor insists that artists swallow every verdict with saintly grace. A well-aimed rebuttal, drafted with humour and proportion, can be electric. Managed well, it sparks proper debate about taste, context and the slippery notion of value. Managed badly, it resembles a Greek tragedy’s primal howl – cathartic for the chorus, enlightening for no one.

Perhaps that’s the point: art and criticism share a goal – to provoke thought, feeling, conversation. They occupy opposite ends of one creative continuum, destined to clash and co-exist. Empty the arena of dissent and the cultural landscape flattens into press-release mulch and hashtag worship. Keep the sparring alive, but fight it with flair, and audiences win twice: first through fearless new work and again in the exhilarating crossfire that follows.

So next time a review draws blood, reach for the keyboard before the catering trolley. Craft a razor-sharp riposte, stage a satirical encore, invite the critic to tomorrow’s matinee and reserve a front-row seat with her name on it. No one ends up wearing steak tartare – and the conversation, the lifeblood of any vibrant arts scene, continues without the stench of spoiled meat.

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