Nicholas Hytner, the 50-year old artistic director of The National Theatre, has tongues wagging and keyboards clicking in the UK today, thanks to comments he made recently in The Times that look an awful lot like this:
They would be horrified by the accusation, but I’m afraid I’m making it. I think it’s fair enough to say that too many of the theatre critics are dead white men. They don’t know it’s happened to them but it has.It took less than a couple of hours for responses to start rolling of the virtual-presses.
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The theatre establishment changes regularly and representatively because the audience changes. We have to change or the audience would stop coming.
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I won’t stay in my job for as long as they stay in theirs. When I become a dead white male I will only be hired to do dead white male theatre.
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In private the female critics are voluble about this. I know that Katie Mitchell gets misogynistic reviews, where everything they say is predicated on her sex. Gay males have never had a problem in the theatre . . . The ones who have it worst are the gay women. They really get it in the neck and there’s a lot of sniggering.
Michael Billington - "I might be a white male, but I'm not dead yet, Mr Hytner."
Benedict Nightingale - "Who are you calling a bigot?"
Lyn Gardner - "Nicholas Hytner is right ..."
Thea Sharrock - "It's about time we reviewed the critics for a change."
Charles Spencer - "Ageism is rife among theatre directors."
UPDATE:
A nice follow-up with more links from t h e a t r e n o t e s .
