Sir, - The drama critics of a major newspaper - such as The New York Times in the United States and certainly The Irish Times here - wield enormous power over the fortunes of a new play. The production of a play represents months of work by the playwright and weeks of intense effort by his director, his actors, and his crew. Yet a drama critic spends a couple of hours watching a play and perhaps another hour thinking about it and writing his criticism. And what he writes can make the play's fortune or destroy it.
When the critics of The Irish Times err, it seems to me generally on the side of gentleness, and I have read many of their reviews which praise, even effusively, works of minor or negligible merit. That is hardly healthy for the theatre, but it is not nearly as bad as the panning of a good show.
The premiere of John Barrett's Borrowed Robes by the Island Theatre Company at the Belltable in Limerick was comprehensively slated by your reviewer Gerry Colgan (The Irish Times, July 24th) and neither the play nor most aspects of the production escaped his denunciations.
The opinion of the first-night audience was far different, and the production was raptly watched and gained four enthusiastic curtain calls. The many people I spoke to about it were overwhelmingly favourable, as were the remarks I overheard.
I think myself that the play and production had a couple of faults, but basically that both were of considerable excellence. The play told a soundly structured story and did not, as so many recent plays do, put six people on the stage to natter about their past. I thought that the characterisation was vivid and in two instances of much more complexity than plays usually give us. I thought that the direction was admirable, the simple set appropriate for the play's structure, and the acting of a high competence - indeed, in the case of John Anthony Murphy, extraordinarily fine. The only hopelessly inadequate thing about the event was its review in The Irish Times. - Yours, etc., Robert Hogan,
Seacrest, Bray, Co Wicklow.