Charles Spencer: theatre critic retires from the Telegraph after 25 years

Charles Spencer, theatre critic for The Daily Telegraph since 1991, delighted in terrorizing actors and directors – but readers loved his brutal honesty, writes Katie McFadden

The journalist Charles Spencer has stepped down from his role as theatre critic for the Daily Telegraph after 25 years. Known for his no-nonsense approach to the theatre, Spencer was highly regarded for his brutal honesty and irreverent sense of humour. As Sarah Crompton, Arts editor-in-chief at the Telegraph put it:

'He always said exactly what he thinks, and that is why people have come to trust him so much. We will all miss reading his reviews'

As Spencer himself said yesterday, 'I have loved my job, but critics shouldn’t go on too long. I feel I’ve had my say and it’s time to put my feet up.'

Born in 1955, Spencer was educated at Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford.  He began his career in journalism at the Surrey Advertiser and went on to write for the Evening Standard, the Stage, and the London Daily News before joining the Daily Telegraph as a sub-editor on the arts pages in 1988. After a few years as deputy theatre critic, in 1991 Spencer became the leading theatre critic on the paper. He was named ‘Critic of the Year’ at the British Press Awards, first in 1999 and again in 2008.

To mark his retirement, we've assembled some of Spencer's most iconoclastic moments...

1. To describe the effect that a nude Nicole Kidman had on the audience in a 1998 production of David Hare’s The Blue Room , Spencer coined the phrase “pure theatrical Viagra”.

2. He provoked Dame Judi Dench into calling him “an absolute s---“, after a scathing review of her performance as Madame de Montreuil in Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade in 2009. 

3. Spencer caused controversy with his summary of a theatre critic’s obligations:  “ Arrive sober , stay awake, stay to the end and don’t take a bribe unless it is big enough to allow you to retire in comfort for the rest of your life.” 

4. This summer he said of Martin Freeman's performance in Richard III : “Freeman seems frankly miscast”, “like a boy sent to do a man’s work”, suggesting “a gaping hole where the charisma ought to be, and his seduction of Lady Anne, which is normally so creepily erotic, has hardly a spark of sex about it.” 

5. Rumours of a squabble between restaurant and TV critic AA Gill and Spencer circulated over the summer in 2007. In a feature in the Sunday Times , Gill asserted that, “no aspect of culture is as badly served by its critics as the theatre is,” and Spencer responded by calling restaurant reviewers a “bone-idle bunch”, who only write “to eat posh grub free.”

6.  In a recent criticism of Tommy Steele’s performance in Scrooge , Spencer dug up an old showbiz legend that Steele was so hated by the backstage crew on the set of Singin’ in the Rain, that “they would regularly urinate into the water tanks that were to rain down on to Steele’s head during his performance of the show’s title number”. Spencer delighted in declaring, “I fear this review is about to perform the verbal equivalent.”

7. His appraisal of Gillian Anderson in a  Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic was poignant: “I staggered out of this shattering production of Tennessee Williams’s bruising modern classic feeling shaken, stirred and close to tears.” 

8. On Shakespeare in Love at the Noel Coward Theatre he wrote: “It’s got the lot – a stirring love story, a prodigious succession of terrific jokes – and it sends up the theatre something rotten while simultaneously delighting in it.”

9. In a review published in the Telegraph in 2012, Spencer courageously revealed that his absence from the paper for the previous three months was caused by his clinical depression. 

10. Spencer has written three crime novels: I Nearly Died (1994), Full Personal Service (1996), and Under the Influence (2000). 

As director Rupert Goold said on Twitter, “In the critic’s tavern, Charlie Spencer was Falstaff – impossible to avoid, here to have fun, lusty, cruel, vivid and once gone oddly missed.”

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