Toby Young
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At first, Jongh couldn’t persuade anyone to put on his play. Called Plague Over England, it is about John Gielgud’s arrest and conviction for cottaging in 1953 — a fairly promising subject, I would have thought, but a reading at the Duchess Theatre in 2006 failed to create much interest. Eventually, Jongh received an offer from the artistic director of a London fringe theatre, but he had to turn it down when he discovered it was contingent on £80,000 being wired to the theatre within seven days.
A second reading was arranged at the Royal Court, but few of the artistic directors and producers Jongh invited bothered to turn up. It looked as though Lloyd and I would be cheated of our moment of schadenfreude — not to mention the countless others whom Jongh had antagonised over the years, including Steven Berkoff, who once issued him with a death threat. Then a saviour appeared. Neil McPherson, the artistic director of a fringe theatre in Earl’s Court called the Finborough, offered Plague Over England a slot. Lloyd and I were cock-a-hoop. We would get our pound of flesh at last.
The press night was last Friday and the following day I leapt out of bed at 6 a.m. and beetled along to the local newsagent to pick up the morning papers. The first critic I turned to was Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail. I knew I could rely on him to be suitably damning. After all, he had described our play as ‘a right royal flop’. ‘It is maddening to report,’ he began, ‘that Nicholas de Jongh…has written a rather interesting play.’
Shurely shome mishtake? Without reading the rest, I tossed the Mail aside and turned to the Guardian. Michael Billington, the doyen of Fleet Street’s drama critics, was guaranteed to take aim at his former Guardian colleague. ‘Well-structured, important and sardonically funny,’ he wrote, awarding Plague Over England four stars.
It was the same story in every paper. A rave in the Telegraph, four stars in the Times and in the Independent. It didn’t get a single bad review. As if to add insult to injury, a few days later I received a Facebook message from the Finborough informing me that this was my last chance to buy tickets to the play. Apparently every performance had sold out, with the exception of 16 March, 21 March and a matinee on 22 March. A West End transfer looks inevitable.
The most depressing thing about this is it gives the lie to the excuse Lloyd and I came up with at the time to account for all our bad reviews. We told ourselves we were never going to get a fair hearing from our colleagues. Of course they would slag it off. They simply couldn’t bear the idea that we had the temerity to write a play. If it was possible to be both a critic and a playwright, they would have done it ages ago. Here was proof, if any were needed, that it is impossible to ride both horses.
Unfortunately, that explanation will no longer wash. Following the reception given to Jongh, it is clear our colleagues are more than willing to give a fellow critic the thumbs-up, if only he or she writes a decent play. In other words, we’ve been forced to confront the possibility that the reason A Right Royal Farce was universally panned is because it wasn’t any good. Will you now go back to your day job, please, Nicholas? You’re making life for the rest of us critics-cum-playwrights extremely difficult.
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