Goodwill Bunting

Not long ago, one of our producers telephoned me and said: “I am putting on a play next week that will not interest you critically in the slightest; it is pretty poor stuff from any sound critical point of view and I am simply hoping to make some money out of it – I need some, as I got hit badly in the stock market crash. I’ve read your dramatic criticism for twenty years and I know that, according to your standards, you’d walk out on a play after the curtain had been up fifteen minutes. So I won’t invite you to review the play and waste your time on it."

Now that is what I call excellent sense! I thanked the gentleman for his honesty and for his implied generosity toward my standards of criticism and assured him that if his fellow producers were as forthright and above-board with reviewers when they put on poor plays designed simply as box-office bumpers, there would be a greatly increased measure of goodwill all around. - George Jean Nathan, Testament of a Critic