Thieves and Parasites: on Forty Years of Theatre Reviewing in England

Irving Wardle has spent his working life as a theatre reviewer – for thirty-seven years after 1959 passing what he estimates to have been an average of four nights a week, excluding holidays, sitting in theatres, and turning out notices to meet overnight or weekly deadlines – successively as deputy to Kenneth Tynan on The Observer, from 1963 as long-serving critic for The Times, and subsequently for the Independent on Sunday until he retired from the profession in 1995. The following retrospect was originally conceived as a talk for the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada, where it was delivered in July 1996. While a good deal of the history of British theatre through which Irving Wardle moved will be familiar to NTQ readers of the same generation, he brings to that common experience an uncommon perspective – and here confesses frankly to failures of judgement and misgivings, as well as snaring some of the underlying motivations and turning points of his career.