Critics are cultural Titans, particularly in the world of the théâtre. At a time when truly inspired new work seems particularly sparse and precious, critics are the gatekeepers in charge of making sure that anything which defies easy classification is dismissed, or, better, drenched in scornful piss. Ideally, if the person or company responsible for a piece of theatre (or comedy or performance poetry or any other form of live entertainment) is fairly new to the game, a mediocre review in a broadsheet should discourage the conventional-media audience from going to see them so completely that the artist’s pursuit of their chosen career is no longer financially viable and they give up trying. The role of the newspaper theatre critic is particularly significant, as the only people who read broadsheet theatre reviews are middle-aged, middle-class-plus people with big ideas about themselves, ie., the only people in the world with the money and the desire to go to the theatre. I must stress that these are all opinions which I personally hold based on my own mixed experiences with inviting reviewers to work that I’ve done.

However, we must not look down upon the humble arts writer — their job is not solely to trash, but also to remain in touch with the cultural landscape, which is to say, to endorse things that make them look clever or can be flatteringly compared to Fleabag and to eradicate work which doesn’t seem to resemble other things they’ve enjoyed recently, or which can be unfavourably compared to Fleabag. As someone who has never really produced anything that could be placed in the same bracket as Fleabag, I’ve escaped this particular torment, but I don’t want that fact to distract you from just how enduringly bitter I am about lukewarm critical reception throughout my career to date from various figures whose opinion seems to be worth something for some reason.

It gets more complicated when you’re attached to a particular publication, of course. If you are a theatre critic for, let’s say, The Daily Mail, you not only have to hold each review subject up to your own standards of creative merit (see previous paragraph) but must also keep in mind the political convictions of your parent company. You might think that a piece of work resembles the sort of thing that a clever person would like just enough to nudge it over the three-star threshold, but wait, stop — does it feature a predominantly BAME cast, or more than one speaking woman? Don’t forget, you work for The Daily Mail, even if you are an arts critic and did at one point possess some sort of intellectual integrity, and as such this production must have at least one star knocked off it for being a product of the lefty Remoaner politically correct metropolitan elite. After all, that all-important right-wing counter-narrative isn’t going to manufacture itself, is it? I’ve never been reviewed by The Daily Mail, myself. There are times when I’ve very stridently thought that I wouldn’t hold with such a thing, that I wouldn’t want their coverage. There are also times, particularly in the dead middle of a run at the Edinburgh Fringe where I’ve sincerely thought that I’d gladly fellate Richard Littlejohn if it meant some sort of positive press attention in any news outlet, anywhere, so I can’t particularly claim any moral high ground on this issue.

On the other hand, let’s say you work as an arts critic for The Guardian. The challenges are entirely different. Not only are you, by contrast, expected to promote and celebrate precisely that work which will appeal to the lefty Remoaner politically correct metropolitan elite, but you have to remember that — come on — this is The Guardian we’re talking about. This isn’t your wrapped-around-a-battered-sausage-and-large-chips review of yet another adaptation of Hedda Gabler at the National. This is The Guardian. As such, all work has to be held to the standard of Daniel Day-Lewis’s Hamlet, whether it’s at the Young Vic, the Royal Court or in a room above a pub in Stoke Newington. If this seems unreasonable of me — and it might, as there are many extremely talented and insightful arts writers working at The Guardian today — I ask you to bear in mind that it comes from a place of extreme personal prejudice as the only Guardian review I’ve ever received was a two star write-up for a play I directed and it effectively sank our only chance at reaching a wider audience. One person who came to the last night even told me, to my face, that he would have come to see it earlier, only he’d seen the Guardian review and assumed it wasn’t worth seeing. Fortunately for us, he had run out of other things he fancied seeing in town, so he took a punt on the show and we got to add his fifteen quid to the box office takings, which somewhat offset the enormous financial loss we took in putting on the show in the first place.

So a critic is not only a gatekeeper but a cultural watchdog, shouldering the Christ-like burden of shepherding an ignorant, bewildered public towards only those pieces of art which will challenge their perceptions of the world slightly, but not so much that it will make them angry. With that in mind, I re-state my affirmation which serves as the title of this article, which I hope was startling and upsetting enough to trick you into reading this far into what is, I must repeat, an entirely unfair and subjective evaluation of the craft of arts criticism based solely on my own personal bitterness: Quentin Letts is the most perfect possible lead theatre critic for The Sunday Times.

Today, a reader of The Sunday Times is much like a reader of The Daily Mail who can do joined-up writing. There was a time, it is told in myths and legends, that the Times and its shrink-wrapped Sunday sibling were dependable and concerned primarily with sensible, no-nonsense journalism. Its right-wing bias was undeniably there, but was cuddlier and more moderate, like an otherwise kindly uncle who occasionally makes knowing comments about ‘these transsexuals’ while raising his eyebrows, which you ignore out of social awkwardness and some sort of arbitrary familial affection.

However, at some point around June 2016, the paper’s Overton window appeared to shift from the centre-right to somewhere just on the other side of Steve Bannon’s grandmother after two glasses of gin on Christmas Day. This is presumably because someone realised that not only was out-and-out bigotry totally cool again, but in fact was desired, nay, demanded by the paper’s readership, who could finally breathe easy, reattach the flag of St George pin to their jacket and cancel their now-redundant Spectator subscription.

When a prominent paper’s editorial policy develops and evolves so radically, so better to meet the needs of the British public, do you think that the senior staff would be so cravenly idle as to allow its arts coverage to lag behind? I say thee nay. If The Times is to continue in this bold new vein, then every part of its whole must reflect that. So who better to represent the new Times, the stronger Times, the Times which can truly troll the snowflake millennials, than professional victim Quentin Letts?

Was it in Letts’s April 2018 review of the RSC’s production of The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich for the Mail, where he said that an actor had been cast only because he was black, when The Times realised they’d found their man? Or was it when he said he wanted to hold down Polly Toynbee and tickle her, you know, out loud where people could hear, on Radio 4’s Today Programme during a conversation in October 2017 (yes, I said 2017) about one of the non-fiction books Letts writes where he slags off people who are more famous than him? Was it in his various humiliating defeats while attempting to spar with actress Nicola Coughlan on Twitter, after another critic made unsolicited comments about her body in a review of the Donmar Warehouse’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (the other writer later apologised, we can only assume, after he realised Quentin Letts agreed with him about something)? We simply cannot know. But whichever event was the deciding factor, it was clear – here was a man who was prepared to parrot the laziest, most unimaginative views of a sizeable minority of the British public and present them as if they were the rebel yell of an oppressed minority while being paid ten times the salary of a nurse. I’ve never had anything reviewed by Letts, myself, for which I am both eternally grateful and resent him intensely.

This is where Letts was always destined to serve. To condescend, to patronise, to dismiss like the finest in his field, and to do so with an innate and explicit racial and sexual bias against every single person involved in a given production, especially the stage managers, as his publication demands. So, all you brave creators, you writers, you producers, all of you in theatreland, as you grudgingly log in Quentin Letts’s press ticket (with a plus one, of course), don’t shrug and think, “great, there’s another seat I can’t sell, given instead to an ungrateful snidey bastard who thinks we’re lucky he’s coming”, instead celebrate the fact that you are keeping the wheels of the arts industry turning! The critical savaging is a rite of passage, as well as a badge of pride for any creator who likes to think of themselves as truly cutting edge — and if bad press destroys your venture and you have to go back to office work, then bad luck, you should have been born wealthy enough to fund multiple loss-leading theatre productions!

In short, we should be grateful. God (Quentin Letts) is in His Heaven (The Sunday Times) and all is right with the world. The gloriously predictable globe of arts journalism continues to spin. Sure as a teenager with a press pass will give an improv comedy group two stars in Edinburgh because they reckon it was probably all scripted in advance, so too will the lead theatre critic of The Sunday Times mock and deride the latest production of Taming of the Shrew at The Globe because there were some black people in it. So let us not be sickened by whatever furore Letts stokes next with his well-rehearsed outrage, profiting off the deep and irrational divisions in our society by prodding them constantly and indiscriminately, like a disturbed child poking a dead rat with a stick for their own amusement, instead let us rejoice that exactly the right person for the job has been located and — thank God — hired for — praise Jesus — far more money than he is worth. We must appreciate the broadsheet arts correspondents while they are here. They’re like the ravens in the Tower of London — they shit all over everything and people seem really invested in them for no good reason.

Tom Crowley is a writer, actor and comedian based in London. He’s received some really rather lovely reviews over the years for various live theatre and comedy pieces he’s been involved in, from very talented critics whom he despises.

First of all, I imagine you’re all thinking, “£3.74 a day? In London? This huge creep must be lying.” So I’d like to clarify, YES, I’m talking about surviving in London, England (not London, Ontario or that small replica London they built in China to make fun of us) on no more money than £3.74 a day, which is what I do. So I’m the proof! It is possible!

Most people, especially, but not limited to, people living in London, often find themselves thinking “Where’s all my money? I thought I had more money.” And in 98% of those cases, their money has gone because they spent it on food, drink, air, or more money. In the remaining 2% of cases, these people have either had their pockets picked or had their money evaporated by an airborne virus which evaporates money that I just imagined.

So let’s stop whipping the cream and get straight to dessert — here’s how I, me, survive in London on only £3.74 a day!

The first thing I used do in a day is put that day’s £3.74 in a safe, secret place which I refuse to reveal for obvious reasons, as I needed every penny of it to pay my rent. The sharp-minded of you will probably already have realised that after a 31-day month, there would only be £115.94 inside the shell of the bin but outside the bag. You might think that this isn’t nearly enough money to afford any rent at all, and you’d be right, because it isn’t! Even if it were enough, it wouldn’t come anywhere close to also covering the costs of council tax, electricity, water or gas. Fortunately, however, if you aren’t able to pay your rent and are evicted by your landlord, you are technically not obliged to pay for any bills or services for the property any more. So there’s a good tip right away.

“Hang on,” I can hear you whining, “I need somewhere to live, I can’t get evicted.” Well, what I’d say to that, if you’d just keep reading for fuck’s sake is that if you’re anything like me, your boss will invite you to live in the room above the shop rent-free, in exchange for a couple of hours of unpaid overtime and occasionally putting your finger up his bottom while he watches QI.

I should probably mention at some point that I arrived at the sum of £3.74 per day because that is what I am paid at my aforementioned job. I work seven eight-hour shifts per week in a fishing supplies shop in Hackney which shall remain nameless. “That’s too little money,” I hear you cringe, but the problem here is that Reel Good Deels is located in a prohibitively expensive retail premises and doesn’t make very much money. My boss, who shall remain Mister Brindsley, puts this down to a) the fact that rather than near any open water, the shop is located in one of the most densely-populated areas of a major urban centre and b) the fact that the shop’s branding is built around a fairly laboured pun which doesn’t explicitly tell you what the shop sells (I’ve been asked whether we sell filmmaking equipment or Reel Big Fish albums on an almost daily basis since I started working there). At least, this is what Mister Brindsley tells me whenever I inquire about a raise or ask how much longer QI is on.

“So just quit and find a better job,” I cannot help but hear you mewl, but you don’t know what you’re talking about and you should learn to stop sticking your nose into other people’s business when you literally don’t even have the merest idea about anything. If you had bothered to do your research, you’d know that I signed my contract after merely skim-reading it, which it turned out was a huge mistake, as there are various clauses in there about me not being allowed to quit ever, or report the business to the Police, or fast-forward QI when Mister Brindsley falls asleep.

“But why did you accept the job in the first place?”, I struggle to avoid hearing you screech. Well, again, you shit, if you had any idea what was going on at the best of times, you’d realise that when I asked about the wage in my interview, I was told “£3.74 per day might not sound like very much, but if you multiply that by 365 days in the year, you get £1,365.10, and that sounds like lots of money, doesn’t it.” I had to concede that indeed, it did, which I was later given to understand constituted a verbal contract to accept the job.

Which leaves me here, in my current position, wondering if I’ll get fired if I pull my finger out of my boss’s anus uncomfortably quickly at the end of an episode, perhaps increasingly quickly each time. I haven’t been, in case you were wondering, and if anything he doesn’t even seem to notice the difference. Nonetheless, I currently survive on £3.74 per day in London, and you can too!

And I don’t buy avocados or whatever.

Tom Crowley is a writer, actor and comedian. He doesn’t work in a fishing supplies shop but he does have his new comedy hour on at VAULT Festival 2019. Tickets available here.

From the music halls of Victorian London, through the development of the modern musical, to the glossy cabaret circuit of the modern day, the history of variety performance is littered with moments to bring joy to the heart and a nostalgic tear to the eye. These are not those moments. When Crowley & Co.’s sell-out variety sensation The Night hits Brasserie Zédel on Monday 3rd April 2017, we hope none of these moments will be repeated.

(Before reading this article, you might want to book tickets for our April 2017 edition of The Night, which you can do here)

5. Sally Allanson Forgets the Words to the National Anthem
Royal Variety Performance, 1952
Throughout the war years, Sally Allanson’s performances of countless sentimental ballads, like Please Come Home, Johnny Boy and My Heart’s in an Aircraft Carrier Moored Near Alameda, buoyed the spirits of British soldiers stationed all over the world. When Sally headlined the 1952 Royal Variety Performance at the Palladium, she was expected to close with a rousing round of God Save the Queen. But as the band struck up and the audience rose to their feet, Sally’s face went blank. She looked around anxiously for a moment, launched confidently into the opening bars of The Star-Spangled Banner, then stopped again, obviously confused. After three and a half agonising minutes of dead silence, Sally said the worst swear word and stormed off the stage. A spokesperson for the Palace described the event as ‘at best, insulting’. At The Night, we avoid any such possible embarrassment by studying the National Anthem rigorously and never performing it.

4. King Kong Breaks Loose, Rampages Through New York
Broadway, 1933
When filmmaker Carl Denham successfully transported Kong, the gigantic ape, from his home on Skull Island, he thought he’d hit the showbiz jackpot! But when Denham presented the chained Kong to an amazed audience of New York’s best and brightest, he was disappointed to say the least when the ape broke free of his fetters and terrorised New York City for one very eventful evening. Kong’s New York experience began well, with a trot down Broadway, a date with a beautiful blonde actor and a visit to the Empire State Building, and was only marred by being machine-gunned to death by strafing aircraft. In the end, it was beauty that killed the beast — and the box office receipts to boot! With The Night’s lack of giant ape performers at the April show, we hope to avoid any similar difficulties.

3. Harold Wilson Storms Stage During Bill Hicks Set
Balham, 1990
For the duration of his short career, Bill Hicks was known as the original rocker-shocker of stand-up comedy, challenging religious and societal taboos with every inflammatory gag. But ‘The Hicks’ was in for a surprise of his own when, during a headline twenty minutes at Big Bob’s Balham Bonanza, he encountered the most challenging heckling of his life. In the middle of a routine about the shortcomings of the cattle farming industry, Hicks was stopped in his tracks when the former Labour Prime Minister of Britain, Harold Wilson, shouted from the crowd that the comedian was ‘a rude man, a very, very rude man’. Wilson then climbed onto the stage and remonstrated with Hicks, screaming oaths such as ‘who do you think you’re talking to, you Yankee agitator’ and ‘I was the f — Prime Minister, you b — ’. Hicks ended his set early and settled for half his agreed fee. At The Night, we charge a deposit for any former Prime Ministers in attendance, to be retained in the event of poor behaviour.

2. The Miraculous Miguel Skewers the Austrian Ambassador
Bloomsbury Hall, 1968
The Miraculous Miguel’s knife-throwing act was the talk of London’s cabaret circuit in the late 1960s, and Miguel’s star was in the ascendent, with his fee at one point recorded as £300 per throw. His performance at Uncle Jack’s Wild World of Wonders was supposed to be an ordinary dagger-juggling with no frills, and no extra complications, until Miguel (born John Peter Anderson, 1932, Tunbridge Wells) picked Lukas Pichler (then Austrian Ambassador to Great Britain) out of the crowd. Immediately recognising Pichler, Miguel’s nerve broke and his hands became sweaty and began to tremble, witnesses later reported. Adhering to the old adage that ‘the show must go on’, Miguel dutifully strapped Pichler to the rotating wheel, which bore on it the image of then-USSR Premier Alexei Kosygin, in an amusing touch. The amusement was short-lived, however, as Miguel’s third throw was botched, fully severing Pichler’s right leg. Miguel had his license revoked by the Knife-Thrower’s Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but Pichler responded to the event with characteristic good humour, quipping “this is the first time I’ve been caught legless at Bloomsbury Hall”. At The Night, our performers are rather more cautious, and as such we expect no such accident at our show on the 3rd April.

1. Walnut the Speaking Horse Comes Out as a Nazi Sympathiser
Trinco’s Family Circus, 1938
Touring with Trinco’s, Walnut the Speaking Horse had delighted audiences all over Great Britain for the past three years, stamping out greetings and solving simple maths problems with his hooves, using a form of equine sign language. At the tour’s final stop in Hackney Fields, the audience watched horrified as Walnut began stamping out politically incorrect epithets and proclaiming his support for Adolf Hitler, the then-German chancellor, whose discriminatory policies were causing quite a stir in Whitehall. Trinco dissolved his touring circus business and Walnut was destroyed in a controlled explosion, watched by a crowd of cheering patriotic children waving Union Flags. Crowley & Co. promises that there will be no celebration of fascism, nor horse explosions at The Night.

The Night is coming to Brasserie Zédel on Monday 3rd April 2017 at 9:15pm. Joining your hosts this month are Rachel Parris, Natasha Sutton-Williams, Ben Norris, The Story Beast and Bisha K Ali.

Book at bit.ly/the-night!