“I read quite a lot of theatre reviews, and while the best are all sorts of stimulating, I kind of think: we all bloody sound like each other, don’t we? I mean, there’s some textural variety: Susannah Clapp is poetic; Michael Billington does puns; Quentin Letts hates theatre. But, as a rule, it’s difficult to see exactly how theatre criticism has stylistically shifted since Tynan’s time – or before that, even: for Ben Brantley, the most powerful theatre critic in the world, it is forever 1851.”