Is it a tragedy? No! It's a comedy

Is My Night with Reg: a) an Aids comedy, b) a betrayal, c) yet another gay play, or d) none of the above? Carl Miller laments the critic's need to pigeon-hole

A new post-traumatic stress syndrome affecting middle-aged men struck at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs last month. Watching hardened theatre critics staggering down the stairs in splenetic rage was an entertaining coda to the press night of Sarah Kane's Blasted. After that performance there were no Blasted virgins: everyone arriving to see the play had already been told that this was a cross between Reservoir Dogs and The SCUM Manifesto. The coverage forced everyone, sympathiser or opponent, into a distinct and unhelpful context for discussion of the play.

Few people in fact arrive at a theatre without some notion of what is about to happen: from the recommendation of a friend, to the image on a poster in the street. Publicity departments strive to sell the plays, occasionally in advance of any clear notion of what is being sold. Marketing expert Guy Chapman was berated by the Independent over misleading pre- publicity for one new play, which had not been written at the time it had to be publicised. Similarly, early reports of Phyllis Nagy's new play The Strip, currently at the Royal Court, described it as a piece about "Gambling, its history, politics and psychology... by a self-confessed gambling addict", which is a bit like calling The Cherry Orchard a fascinating guide to fruit farming.

Watching a new play is never easy. There are no guidelines to fill you in on the writer's intentions or the symbolic implications of what you witness. Some playwrights try to help: Edward Bond writes poems for the programme, and Howard Barker publishes manifestos setting out the principles of his theatre. Mostly, however, playwrights expect audiences to get it right unassisted. Theatre critics are thus particularly vulnerable, having to sum up responses to complex pieces of work in a matter of hours.

In his book The Aisle Is Full of Noises, the Observer critic Michael Coveney claims: "I'm not paid to be right. I'm paid to be interesting." Equally, for the theatre critic Carole Woddis, the business of reviewing is never one of simple objective statements: "If there is a new play, can it just be judged on whether it's `good' or `bad'? Whose `good' and whose `bad' is it? I'm only one person." The problems arise because the critical comments made by Woddis, Coveney and the rest of the first-night crowd become part of the marketing process, in which an ill-considered "Not to be missed" is more desirable than 500 thoughtful yet non-committal words.

In addition, the range of work assessed by theatre reviewers is not in any way matched by their own diversity. London newspaper critics demonstrate the range of responses possible from a group of men in comfortable shoes. The near-universal abuse of Blasted did not split entirely along gender lines, but the fact that its central character was a white, middle-aged journalist of vividly plausible gruesomeness cannot have done Kane any favours.

The critical response to black theatre in this country is skewed and inadequate, in part because no national newspapers employ black theatre critics. When the veteran critic Milton Shulman complained in the Evening Standard late last year of a plague of gay plays in London, his objection was that the number of plays by and about gay men being seen by London audiences was disproportionate. By this reasoning, Shulman should, of course, be storming the barricades for more black drama. He has not, for example, written an article pointing out that the National, the RSC and the Royal Court between them produced no new plays by black writers during the whole of 1994. Neither has any one of his critical colleagues.

Since lesbians are also hardly proportionally represented in the West End, Phyllis Nagy's current visibility should cause Shulman joy. That it doesn't is no surprise to Woddis, the only openly lesbian national theatre critic (her gay male counterparts are more numerous). The absence of other lesbian voices has its effects, Woddis acknowledges. "I know my defensiveness is highly charged," she says, "perhaps more than that of gay men, because we haven't gained those spaces yet. It's still dangerous to be perceived as lesbian."

It has, however, been a week for living lesbians - Nagy at the Royal Court, Tammis Day at the Drill Hall - and dead gay men - Orton at the National, Rattigan in the West End. The issues become even more complicated, since sexuality provides no artistic bond between writers. Orton told his diary that he couldn't like Rattigan's plays, no matter how much the senior playwright supported Orton's own work. Because an Orton and a Rattigan play (or a Nagy and a Day) are such different works, many lesbian or gay male writers resist the label.

Labels are crucial in selling plays, however. For Kevin Elyot, whose play My Night with Reg was one of those bemoaned by Shulman, the first discussions about leaflet copy were crucial: "Someone said: `It's a sad piece about Aids,' and I thought, no, that's not right, it's a comedy." With a Best Comedy Award behind it, the fact now seems obvious, but, says Guy Chapman, who is running the My Night with Reg publicity campaign, such choices are crucial to getting the right audience aware of a new play. "We made a conscious decision to treat it as an Ayckbourn play in the West End," he says, although with one twist: the naked man whose rear view shares the poster with the six clothed cast members. "The nude gives a signal: if you are offended by that, don't come."

Not all the problems for playwrights come from outside their communities: it is not just the predictable fag-baiters like Shulman or the Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer (in fact a Reg fan) who castigate gay or lesbian playwrights. Last month in the national news magazine Gay Times, the critic and activist Simon Watney pronounced himself "nauseated" by My Night with Reg. "This is Aids without any question whatsoever of HIV status, or clinic trials, benefits, housing, or long years of protracted illness and cumulative loss," he scolded. Elyot cannot understand the point. "Inevitably, I knew there would be detractors. I thought it was more likely to come from a Tory rag, however. But no, it came from my own kind. It's deeply depressing."

Nagy, too, has been criticised by those who seek a sort of Lavender Socialist Realism in which heroic perverts band together free of personal animosity to create a better future. One particularly facile attack singled her work out as "anti-mother", for an unflattering picture of a parent-child relationship. Such criticism often assumes that writers are closeted or depoliticised, neither of which is true of Nagy. "There's an assumption that everybody's politics within the minority group are the same - or rather that they should be the same," she points out.

The final irony is that, as Kevin Elyot says, even a favourable press response creates its own dangerous agenda: "It's as if people want to keep moaning around in the swamps of defeat. They'd probably really like Reg if it was a failure."

n Carl Miller's `Stages of Desire - Homosexuality and Theatre' will be published by Cassell later this year