Standard Critic de Jongh Quits to Pen More Plays

De Jongh steps down after 18 years as the senior critic at the Evening Standard, which he joined in 1991 and which was recently bought for the reported sum of £1 by Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev. Prior to the Standard, de Jongh was at the Guardian for nearly 20 years, starting as a general reporter before becoming arts correspondent and then deputy drama critic to Michael Billington. He’s also the author of Politics, Pruderies and Perversions, which won the Society of Theatre Research Prize in 2001, and Not in Front of the Audience, a history of homosexuality on stage.

Plague Over England premiered last year at the Finborough Theatre in Earl’s Court, west London, garnering acclaim from de Jongh’s critical colleagues and a nomination for a Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers’ Choice Award, in the Best Off-West End Production category. It transferred – with several new cast members, including Michael Feast as John Gielgud and Celia Imrie as Sybil Thorndike – to the West End’s Duchess Theatre, where it opened on 23 February 2009 (previews from 11 February) and is currently booking until 16 May.

At a recent Whatsonstage.com Outing to the production (See WOS Radio, 13 Mar 2009), de Jongh gave no indication of plans to cease reviewing – or indeed to go any softer in his reviews – though he did admit that the experience of mounting and transferring a play had “entirely” changed his perspective. “This experience here on the West End felt like the real painful thing. It was quite awful,” he told the Whatsonstage.com audience. “I don’t mean it in a negative sense at all, but it was agonising. The whole commercial process is very difficult and very daunting. I have a lot more humility in terms of what everyone has to do to make a West End straight play happen.”

Set in 1953, Plague Over England centres on Gielgud when, at the height of his fame, he was arrested in a Chelsea public lavatory. He pleaded guilty the following morning to the charge of persistently importuning men for immoral purposes. Poised to appear in the West End in a play he was directing and recently knighted, his conviction caused a national sensation – breaking the great taboo of public discussion of homosexuality.

De Jongh is now working on a screenplay of Plague Over England with stage producer Bill Kenwright and Simon Fuller’s company, 19 Entertainment. In an interview this week with the Independent newspaper, de Jongh said the play had been “transformational” for him: “I want to be creative now”.

No date has been set publication of de Jongh’s final review and no announcement made for his replacement at the Evening Standard, where the second-string critic is Fiona Mountford. De Jongh admits that the timing of his departure so soon after the new management has taken over, and replaced editor Veronica Wadley with Geordie Greig, formerly of Tatler magazine, is not coincidental. “I don’t want to be part of the new Standard”, he told the Independent. “I was part of the old Standard.” He will, however, remain on the judging panel for the Evening Standard Theatre Awards.

– by Terri Paddock