24-05-2025
‘I hope one of your family members dies': when artists bite back at their critics
In 1973, the theatre critic John Simon wrote a negative review of a performance by Sylvia Miles, mocking the actress as 'one of New York's leading party girls and gate-crashers'. Unfortunately for Simon, he happened to be dining in the same restaurant as Miles soon afterwards. On seeing him, she dumped her plate of steak tartare and brie over his head. 'Now you can call me a plate-crasher, too,' she said.
Childish? Funny? A fair response to an overly harsh personal comment rendered in print for the world to see? Or maybe… all of those things? Sure, nobody likes being criticised. But, for artists and performers, it generally comes with the job. The question is how, and whether, to respond.
I've spent more than a decade as a journalist writing about arts and culture, most recently as this newspaper's radio critic. I've also written about the unique power dynamics between performers and critics in Bring the House Down, my debut novel about a theatre critic who experiences a sensational comeuppance from an actress at the Edinburgh Fringe who decides to give him a taste of his own medicine. The events of the novel and its characters are pure fiction, but gut-churning human responses to personal criticism are a fact of life.
There have been plenty of times when I've reviewed a show in a way that the person behind it has hated. Sometimes, they've let me know about it. I've had comedians cheerfully mock me, my family and my personal life on stage for months and even years after I've reviewed them. I've received long, anguished emails from TV presenters calling me 'disappointingly shallow' after I'd said their documentaries were opaque and navel-gazing.
To some extent – and somewhat paradoxically – receiving criticism is an inevitable part of being a critic. But sometimes, a negative critical response can drive creative people into the realm of irrational fury.
For instance, both Robbie Collin and Tim Robey, this newspaper's film critics, have experienced their share of vicious bite-back over the years. After writing a few less-than-positive reviews of films released by a major film studio in the US, Collin learned from a friend that he was being referred to by marketing executives over there as 'that British c---'. Robey, on the other hand, once so annoyed Harry Enfield by questioning the artistic merit of Kevin & Perry Go Large (2000) that he received a stiff letter from Enfield himself angrily defending the film.
The theatre critic Kate Wyver gave one production three stars out of a possible five, which most critics would agree is a positive review. The production team, however, didn't see it that way. When the show began touring shortly afterwards, the performers handed out badges to the audience emblazoned with the slogan: 'Don't be like Kate Wyver.'
Some responses are more extreme. When The Guardian's Phil Daoust gave Tim Minchin a one-star review, the comedian responded on stage with a freshly minted composition called The Song for Phil Daoust, in which he called Daoust a 'poo-face' who 'should quit and get a job that you'd be better at / Like killing yourself', continuing with 'I hope one of your family members dies'. Daoust took exception to the cruelty of that last line, but overall his response was philosophical: 'I slagged him off in the platform I had access to, and he did the same to me. What's sauce for the goose, etc. And he took the trouble to spell my name correctly, which was nice.'
That's a more generous response than that given by the French critic Stéphane Capron last year after Angélica Liddell, the Spanish theatre-maker, called him a 'bastard' and demanded that he 'face [his] own vileness' on stage at the Avignon performing arts festival, before exposing her bare behind to the crowd. Capron sued her for defamation.
Sometimes, critic-performer spats become a drawn-out war of words, such as the famous feud between Vincent Gallo and the film critic Roger Ebert. Ebert negatively reviewed Gallo's explicit film The Brown Bunny at Cannes in 2003, singling it out as 'the worst film in the history of the festival'. In response, Gallo called Ebert 'a fat pig' and said he had put a curse on Ebert's colon. 'I am not too worried,' Ebert responded in print. 'I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny.'
It's understandable that artists, who put great stores of effort and energy into their work, are hurt by such critical reviews, even though most would also concede that if every single review was a five-star rave, they would lose all value. Bad reviews can cripple the fortunes of a piece of creative work. Just look at the film Cats (2019), which essentially sparked a contest among the critics to see who could write the most devastating review. It was 'an all-time disaster', according to The Telegraph's Robey in his zero-star drubbing. The New York Post's Johnny Oleksinski begged someone to 'please wipe this movie from my Memory', while The Boston Globe's Ty Burr reported that 'My eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes'. NPR's headline was, simply, 'Spay it'. The film bombed at the box office.
Or take Elton John 's stage musical Tammy Faye, which the New York Post called 'god-awful' and 'a disaster of biblical proportions', and which closed on Broadway last year just five days after opening. Or Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bad Cinderella, the Broadway run of which was cut short in 2023 after a review in The New York Times that began with the line: 'First: bring earplugs', before going on to add 'for that matter, bring eye plugs'.
Negative criticism doesn't always spell doom, however. The Great Gatsby, on publication in 1925, famously met a lukewarm initial response, and, well, look how that turned out. The original stage production of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag at the Edinburgh Fringe, likewise, had an unenthusiastic early reception, but still went on to become an international television mega-hit.
Would any of those works' fortunes, good or bad, have been improved by their creators lashing out at the critical naysayers? Or would it just have made things worse?
And how far is too far? The Stranglers are said to have once gaffer-taped the French rock magazine editor Philippe Manoeuvre to the Eiffel Tower, with bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel describing him as 'an annoying little oik'. In 2023, the ballet director Marco Goecke was suspended from his post at Hanover State Opera after he smeared dog excrement in the face of critic Wiebke Hüster, in retaliation for a review in which she described his work as boring. The police got involved with that one. And the journalist Bernard Levin once reportedly feared for his life when he found himself on a railway platform with the late playwright John Osborne, who famously hated critics, and threatened to push Levin under an oncoming train.
Emotions and tempers can run high in the arts and in journalism, but it's hard to argue that this means cultural criticism shouldn't exist at all. The alternative is a world in which only adoring quotes from anonymous social media users adorn theatre, film and comedy posters. And would that tell us anything useful?
It's never enjoyable to receive a bad review, nor is it nice for a critic to feel that they've suddenly become a target. Perhaps the relationship between performance and criticism was healthier in Ancient Greece, where writers largely lampooned one another through their actual plays, with the critical conversation playing out on stage as part of the entertainment. A modern equivalent might be the German film director Uwe Boll's approach, which involved challenging each of his five fiercest critics to face him in the boxing ring in 2006. In a filmed event dubbed 'Raging Boll', Boll won all five matches. In a press conference afterwards, he said 'I now like the critics... Everybody who was in the ring showed guts.'
Surely nobody should be throwing actual punches at all – but maybe artists aren't the only ones who suffer for art. Maybe straddling the line between honesty and cruelty is the hardest job a critic has to undertake, and maybe accepting criticism with grace is, likewise, the hardest part of any artist's work. But, when both of them achieve it, we all benefit from a rich cultural conversation.
Still, there's a good reason that the word 'theatre' is applied to war zones and surgical operating rooms as well as to performance spaces: it's an easy place to draw blood.
