Is there a future for serious criticism? I passionately hope so. I began my own adventures in the critical trade 50 years ago in the pages of Cherwell. Thanks to the benign tolerance of a succession of Guardian editors, I’m still at it. Still trying to make sense of tonight’s theatre for tomorrow’s readers and still hunting for the right words as my 11.15pm deadline approaches. But, while I remain optimistic, I think we should all recognise the threats criticism faces.

First, there’s new technology which I see as both friend and foe. As an old hack who has had to adjust to new techniques, I recognise the advantages of the internet. It means reviews can be disseminated instantly. It opens up debate. It challenges the critic’s presumed authority (mind you, as long as I’ve been writing, readers have been questioning my views). But there is also a downside to the new democracy. Too many people on the blogosphere, shielded by anonymity, substitute abuse for rational debate. Gossip sometimes takes the place of argument: especially true in New York but now starting to happen in London where Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies, for instance, was comprehensively rubbished long before it officially opened. And tweeting, which I’ve never actually done, strikes me as the enemy of serious criticism which is not simply about having opinions: it’s about the ability to express them with whatever fluency, grace and wit one can muster.

But I see many other threats to criticism today. One is the prevalence of a consumer culture which demands that virtually all the arts- theatre, cinema, opera, ballet- be judged in the same manner as bars, cafes and restaurants. Obviously I’m talking about the system of star-ratings which we all have to use. My objection to the star-system is very simple. It pre-empts the review itself and it is dangerously arbitary. How many stars do you give a fine play that is poorly directed or, conversely, a masterly production of a second-rate piece? Plays are also complex, elusive things that defy easy categorisation. If some harassed hack had to rush out of the Inns of Court- where it was first performed- and slap a star-rating on the first night of Troilus and Cressida, it would probably only have rated a three.

Along with consumerism, I see the growth of a consensus-culture as another visible danger. This is difficult to pin down but I am convinced that it is getting harder to express a maverick opinion that contradicts the majority. It may be because the blogosphere tends to make us more conformist. It may be because of the conditioning of pre-publicity and hype. But, in my field, many of the greatest reviews have been those that challenged the prevailing view. Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times eloquently hailed Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party as a masterpiece when it had been viciously attacked by all the national dailies (I should say that in Oxford and Cambridge it was perceptively reviewed on its pre-London tour). Similarly Kenneth Tynan in The Observer fiercely championed Osborne’s Look Back In Anger in the teeth of much opposition. Today, however, I see much more cosy consensuality. If you dare to question, as I have, the merits of Les Miserables, The Lion King or, more recently, a Judy Garland show called End of The Rainbow, you are treated as a mad eccentric.

Space-restrictions also make the modern critic’s life difficult. I look with envy at the essay-style reviews of a previous generation or at the copious lengths enjoyed by Ben Brantley writing about theatre in the New York Times or Alex Ross about music in the New Yorker. Their London counterparts, unless writing for a magazine like the TLS, are expected to cram description, interpretation and evaluation of any work into a maximum of 450 words. It concentrates the mind wonderfully but it’s also a demanding discipline.

I don’t, however, wish to whinge. I count myself lucky to have been allowed by The Guardian to roam freely over theatre, not only here but abroad, over the past 40 years. And, if I stress the hazards faced by the modern critic, it is in the firm belief that they can be overcome. In theatre, there is an honourable tradition of criticism that stretches back from Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt through to Shaw, Beerbohm, Agate, Hobson and Tynan. I just hope there is someone out there reading this who yearns to be part of that distinguished line and who is ready to confront the challenges facing the contemporary critic. At its best the job is, as C.E.Montague of The Manchester Guardian once wrote, “the adventures of a soul amongst masterpieces.” What more seductive occupation could there possibly be?

At First Sight, his first play, has been four years in the making – Oxford graduate and last year’s Drama Officer Barney Norris was always shy about showing his ‘awful work’ to anyone.

He needn’t have been so modest- At First Sight won the Drama Association of Wales’ One Act Play Competition of 2010, earned its author a place on the prestigious Royal Court Young Writers programme, is about to be published and will be premiered at the BT next week, before touring to London and Salisbury.

The play presents two characters, Jack and Holly, who reminisce about their short-lived holiday romance, trying to remember the details and recreate the beautiful moments before it all went wrong.
Norris describes the play as ‘simply, a love story. It’s also a play about memory – the attempt and the impossibility of getting back to a moment – how people live on multiple levels all at once in their heads. But at its core it’s about two people meeting and parting, in a great place’.

That place is Salzburg, which Norris visited 6 months before starting At First Sight, and he calls the play a ‘love letter to that city’. ‘In a way it’s the play’s central subject – the question of what they fall in love with – each other or the moment. And the moment is Salzburg.’ The script is brimming with beautifully evocative images of the mountains where Jack lives and Holly has gone to ski.

The title brings to mind the clichéd ideal of love at first sight, but, as Norris says, ‘love at first sight always implies the need for a second look.’ The many subtle contradictions in their memories lead us to question the truth of what we see, and bring out very poignantly the subjectivity of memory.

Norris says, ‘Emotion is just a release of chemicals. Certain occasions release the same kind of chemicals – the moment you realise you’ve sent the text to the wrong person and the moment when in a dream you fall off a cliff are the same emotion. So when you’re trying to think back to the moment when you first met that person, you’re inevitably reminded of those other times when you had the same emotional response. You can try to pin a thing down, but it gets lost in other thoughts.’ Hence Jack fondly recalls a birthday celebration together, while Holly quietly points out that they never shared a birthday.

The play’s complex structure is influenced by the film Brief Encounter and the way it plays with the human mind, varying one’s emotional response to the same image by changing what is shown before it: ‘The opening scene [of Brief Encounter] is just boring, you’re wondering ‘why is this woman talking crap’? And then you get to the end and you’re crying, and it’s the same scene. It’s how you montage it.’

After having the play in his head for four years, I wonder how Norris feels about other people portraying it according to their own interpretation. He sees this as a positive: ‘Directors can see things you can’t. For the good of the play it’s actually really important that the characters weren’t how I imagined them.’

He describes being struck during the casting process by how people were reading his lines in a way totally different to how he’d imagined: ‘I didn’t realise there were any jokes in the play! I thought it was all quite serious and meaningful and sad, and then people were delivering these monologues with smiles on their faces!’

For Norris, theatre is collaborative, and describes the biggest kick he gets as ‘being in a room with these people who are so much better than you at what they do. What you’re imagining is so much better when other people bring things to it.’This is the philosophy behind the formation of his theatre company, Up in Arms, for as he says, ‘if you work repeatedly with people, you make more interesting work.’ This is the 12th play in which he has collaborated with director Alice Hamilton.

The future looks bright for Barney Norris. He’s already been commissioned to write a play for the Playhouse in Trinity term. He describes Call of the Wild as about ‘systems, clashing of cultures, political tectonics…and about a dog going on a journey.’ If it’s anything like At First Sight, it will be clever, moving, beautifully written and certainly a must-see.

Why do you always wear black?’ Masha is asked in Chekhov’s jewel of a play, The Seagull. She responds with the frequently quoted line ‘I’m
in mourning for my life’. These opening lines prove to me that Chekhov clearly understood the importance of costume in terms of defining character. Just as the clothes of the people you pass every day on the street can tell you about anything from their income to how much they take care of themselves right up to what they want you to think of them, costume tells you a myriad of things about a character on stage. The costume designer’s role is not simply to pick out pretty clothes that work well with the set and fit a balanced colour palette. They must get into the mindset of each of those characters, and must be able to demonstrate to the audience aspects of that character that the character himself might not even be consciously aware of.

The theme of decay is of key importance to this play, and this
need not just be shown through language or physicality. The character of Sorin diminishes physically and in terms of status as the play progresses. An apparently shrunken man in an overlarge suit says more than simply that the costume designer can’t measure suits properly. Just as a play tells the story of complete lives in only a few hours, sometimes only one costume must be able to tell the story of a character.

Costumes help to unravel the visual story in other ways. They say
that you will never truly understand a person until you walk a mile in
their shoes. The same is true of acting. So when an actor makes the
slightly unexpected request for his character’s shoes to be ‘well-
worn’ and to have them for rehearsal as soon as possible, I am all too happy to comply. From spats to hats, boleros to cummerbunds, costumes alter the way an actor views his character. The fashions of the turn-of-the-century era especially can be hard to wear – an abundance of petticoats make clothes much heavier and more difficult to manage than modern clothing. They change the way actors move and stand, and it is often not until the costume fitting that an actor can fully visualise his character.

This is a play that has been performed so many times that it is
difficult to strike the balance between staying true to its core and
bringing our own inspirations and influences to it. The style of the
language to me is very much rooted in a specific time but the emotions and human interactions are as relevant to a modern audience as they were when Chekhov wrote the play. It is no surprise to me that it has been called an immortal piece of theatre, and yet it is the set and costumes that really place it in one era. It is important that these complement the language and acting without distracting. Like an excellent piece of film music that plays your heart strings without you even being aware, sometimes the most effective design is one which does not draw attention to itself. Sometimes, however, a costume must make a statement as loud as an actor’s passionate outburst.

Choosing costumes for this particular play has been quite an
experience. So far, I have been faced with the challenge of designing
a costume that must be timeless and ethereal for a symbolist play- within-a-play, and have been regaled with stories of surgery by one
particular wardrobe mistress: ‘black as a pot but a fabulous surgeon’.
All in a day’s work.

Addressing a student audience at Corpus Christi College, Paul Roseby is daring enough to admit that he is unconvinced as to the benefits of a university education. Yet, during his talk and our subsequent interview, his passion for the talent and importance of young people is evident. He describes the performers he works with as ‘fearless’ compared with more seasoned actors, which complements his ‘pacey, theatrical, surprising and inventive’ directorial style, and so he seems ideally suited to his position as Artistic Director of the National Youth Theatre, returning to the organisation which kick-started his career in the theatre, on TV and on radio.

The NYT, for Roseby, deserves recognition not only for being the first youth organisation of its kind but also for its consistently groundbreaking approach, staging entire programmes of ‘challenging productions’ and bringing together talents from across the UK. His time there as a teenager ‘opened my mind to other worlds, other people’. While praising its nationwide view, however, he is aware that ‘the word “national” can be a handicap.’ His argument that ‘you can’t be national without being local’, although a glib sound-bite, may leave those who prefer to support their local youth theatres unconvinced, and he himself recognises the power of geographically and culturally specific projects: ‘some of the best plays I’ve ever seen have been community plays, in a community environment, part of a community that have never seen theatre at all.’

Roseby is keen to assure me that NYT is not a static institution: ‘an institution is something that stands still, or slowly evolves, or gets put upon by time trawl.’ At NYT there is a fresh intake of young people every year and, much as he loves it, Roseby will not be staying there forever: ‘I don’t know where I’ll be when I leave the National Youth Theatre in a couple of years, I don’t know what I want to do, but I always want to start and finish it where theatre is, because theatre is the last brave bastion of truth and the platform to make a difference.’

Telling the truth and making a difference seems to be Roseby’s directorial mantra – that’s why so many of his plays have a topical message, although he admits this helps marketing as well (and ‘sometimes, you have to market the hell out of it’). Some devised pieces he has worked on he wouldn’t repeat, such as a drama satirising the internet, while others like Faliraki – The Greek Tragedy, which dealt with binge drinking, he would: ‘we could be doing it this Christmas and it would still be very fresh and relevant.’ When I question whether concentrating on the topical obscures longer-lasting themes, he responds immediately: ‘your way in is something immediate and topical but underneath it, a good play has more than one layer.’ This is why he enjoys working with older texts. When he talks about the NYT’s upcoming production of Orpheus, at the Old Vic Tunnels, he mentions the anniversary of 9/11 and the presence of fear in our own society: ‘there could be a good time to do Orpheus and a bad; I think next year’s a good time.’

The continuing relevance of great drama recently brought him back to the BBC, where he worked at the start of his career, to film When Romeo Met Juliet. The programme brought together two groups of teenagers from disparate backgrounds to perform Romeo and Juliet under Roseby’s direction. His disappointment in the BBC’s treatment of the project still seems a little raw: ‘I think I would have liked a bit more honesty about the drama off the stage. I injected time and energy into it and would have liked a little more returned.’ For him, the project wasn’t about teaching people Shakespeare, but about the potential problems of mixing young people from different racial and cultural backgrounds, problems the BBC producers seemed too scared to tackle. The students, he tells me, did get on ‘but we weren’t allowed to talk about the fact that they might not.’

When Romeo Met Juliet is indicative of Roseby’s perception of theatre as having a purpose, of plays as being useful tools for change, not untouchable historical texts. His impatience with ‘puritans’ who objected to the breaking of the ‘very academic rule’ of sticking to iambic pentameter in his Shakespearean productions, for instance, is obvious. This desire for flexibility is also evident in his interest in performance spaces: ‘I’d like the Royal Opera House to be slightly more inventive in its space. Why can’t you do a promenade through the back corridors, be surprising about your venues and break the rules within your traditional seating?’ He does however recognise the practical difficulties of alternative venues: ‘you’re not in your comfort zone at all so, in a theatre, it’s technically easier to produce a play.’

That’s what is most interesting about listening to Roseby talk: he veers from almost revolutionary idealism to being eminently practical in a matter of seconds. When I ask how he himself proposes to ‘break the rules’ (as he urged the audience in the earlier lecture) he mentions directing a drama satirising September 11th. He sums up his childhood desire to act as ‘I just wanted to make people laugh, I just wanted to communicate with people, I just wanted to entertain people.’ He certainly managed all three in the course of his evening visit to Oxford, but how much was ‘true’ is anyone’s guess.

England is on the brink of going to war with Nazi Germany, Edward VIII abdicates and suddenly a prince with a severe speech impediment and fear of public speaking finds himself on the throne: this fascinating historical situation is portrayed in The King’s Speech with wit, pace and subtlety. You do not have to be an avid historian or an enthusiastic supporter of the monarchy to be captivated and charmed by this understated but never dull film which centres on the spiky relationship between King George VI (Colin Firth) and his unorthodox Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush).

Based on the book by Logue’s son, this film has a great sense of authenticity, unlike most recent historical films which have tried too hard to make real stories Hollywood-friendly and, in the process, have become unconvincing and formulaic. Last year Made in Dagenham, an inspirational-film-by-numbers, had an unsupportive husband turn up just in time to see his wife make a rousing speech whilst The Social Network desperately tried to make what was essentially a series of business negotiations visually interesting by placing them in a night club or a hotel room where the bedclothes were on fire. In a moment of pure cinematic Eureka, Mark Zuckerberg sprints across the Campus of Harvard because he has had the brainwave of putting the relationship status on the facebook profile: implausible scenes like these cannot help but make you wonder if these films bear even the slightest resemblance to the true stories upon which they are based. Fortunately, this is not the case in The King’s Speech – the film almost always avoids the predictable and the stereotypical and presents the story as interesting and idiosyncratic.

Engagingly written, attractively shot and impeccably acted, this January release is bound to waltz with dignity and charm into the awards season. The royal family, a speech impediment, a cigar-puffing Winston Churchill – chances are these will go down well with the Academy. Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter and Guy Pearce all put in great performances but it is Colin Firth who will be most lauded for his compelling and sensitive portrayal of the monarch. Critics are suggesting that he has finally shed the wet shirt of his old romantic roles as a reserved English heart-throb. However, he had already made a fairly clean break from this typecasting in A Single Man (2009), where he played an ageing homosexual lecturer, leading a melancholic life in 1960s LA, unable to cope with the death of his lover. In the 2010 awards season this role garnered him a BAFTA for Best Leading Actor and an Oscar nomination. With The King’s Speech, Firth looks set for another triumph.

Steven Spielberg

When Steven Spielberg releases two films in a year you can guarantee a few things: there will be at least one happy ending; one film will be heavy while the other will be light; and he will push the boundaries of film-making. In 2011 Spielberg will release War Horse, a film adaptation of the emotional child’s story about a horse in World War 1, and The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn in which he will create an entire 3D film using Avatar motion-capture technology.

Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman is certainly being versatile this year. First we will see her play a ballerina on the edge in the Oscar-worthy and critically acclaimed Black Swan. She will then become Ashton Kutcher’s love interest in chick-flick No Strings Attached, an astrophysicist in Marvel’s comic film Thor and finally the warrior princess in male-directed fantasy comedy Your Highness. This year, Portman will finally get a chance to show her full range and hopefully prove to Hollywood that she can be box office gold.

Matt Damon

One male actor to look out for this year is Matt Damon who is hitting 2011 with no less than five film releases. Damon is known for being picky with roles but this is to his credit, as he often chooses meaty, interesting ones. He will narrate Inside Job, a documentary about the financial crisis, play a reluctant psychic in the new Eastwood film Hereafter, a cowboy with a lisp in the Coen brothers’ True Grit, a politician in thriller The Adjustment Bureau and then to round it all off a scientist in star-studded Contagion.

Matt Isard

Cary Fukunaga

Cary Fukunaga’s feature film debut, Sin Nombre saw him riding atop Mexican railroad cars, braving bandits, foul weather and low-hanging tree limbs. The director was richly rewarded at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, picking up the US Dramatic Directing Award and the Cinematography Award. However, Latin American railroad yards are replaced by Victorian manor houses in his latest project, an adaptation of the classic Jane Eyre, out in March, starring Mia Wasikowska as the eponymous heroine. 2011 looks set to be another successful year for this promising director.

Alisha Patel

Robert Pattinson

It may strike some as superfluous to flag Robert Pattinson as an actor “to look out for” in his capacity as one of the 100 most influential individuals on earth (dixit Time). Yet 2011 will see a new Robert Pattinson. In stark contrast to the Twilight saga, he has chosen that most salacious and amoral tale for his next role: an adaptation of Maupassant’s Bel Ami, where he plays the eponymous anti-hero, a social climber cum seducer of women.

Sam Jindani