Theatre - Dominic Dromgoole laments the power of the smug old men of the press

I've just taken a kicking. I recently opened The Inland Sea, a play by Naomi Wallace, and, with a few honourable exceptions, the droogs with the baseball bats have taken the show down a side street and given it a fair old going-over. I knew I had it coming. Our company has enjoyed a run of eight hits in a row, and that's stretching the elastic of good fortune a bit too far. Besides, ever since I wrote a book and started sticking my head over a few parapets too many, I've been due a kicking, and it duly arrived. Nevertheless, the savagery of it came as a surprise. And the sadness of having spoilt the arrival of a beautiful new play still smarts.

Sometimes, you get beaten up and you know you deserve it. A couple of years ago, I directed Troilus and Cressida. By the time it went in front of the press, its original good intentions had long been drowned by its multiple small failings, and it didn't deserve good reviews. Although the raging malice of a few critics was an eye-opener - the violence of cowards is always alarming - I had no real complaint.

The Inland Sea was different. This was genuinely surprising. Though not without faults, this was one of those cases when you know the play is righteous, your peers are mumbling respectful phrases, your collaborators feel happy, the night goes well - and then the critics turn up and cut the production's throat.

This is when you start asking the questions that, in sunnier times, you shove to the back of your head; the kinds of questions that a sensible-minded Martian might ask if he was trying to understand the phenomenon of the critic.

Do these people have a special instinct for the theatre?

Occasionally someone is thrown up who does have an exceptional palate: Jack Tinker, for all his flummery, was admired by the profession for his judicious taste. But most of them couldn't tell the difference between a Neuf du Pape and a cooking sherry. They flounder in the dark, grateful for a bit of upfront display. They tend to appreciate acting which is acting (shouting, crying and waving of the arms), directing which is directing (clumsy, explicit insights and falling scenery) and writing which is writing (big themes, big plots, big speeches). Value that is implicit, technique that is buried, flair that is ingrained, all tend to get buried in silence.

For directors, this is bearable, because they have a complicated relationship with their own visibility. But for actors, who dare to walk a true line while the show-off beside them draws all the plaudits, it is unbearable.

Do critics have a special knowledge of the theatre? Far from it. None of them has ever worked in the theatre. There are a couple of failed directors, some failed script readers (failing at that takes some doing) and a few others whose greatest contact with the theatre was failing an audition for Trevor Nunn at Cambridge in 1962. Beyond that, there's nothing. Now, they would argue that professional experience is no prerequisite for discussing the form. But how would the world of football feel if the BBC announced its line-up of panellists for the World Cup as Wayne Sleep, Vivienne Westwood, Patrick Moore and Gary from down the pub? That is what the theatre community has to put up with every night.

Do critics have specialist knowledge of the theatre? Are they distinguished scholars? Ermm, not really. The present bunch have managed to produce a couple of showbiz biographies, some stolid studies of Great Authors, a couple of anthologies of funny poems and . . . that's about it. It hardly amounts to an oppressive bulldozer of academe, more of a book club in Bexhill-on-Sea.

Do they represent the public? Well, no. The last time I looked, the public wasn't predominantly made up of overeducated, portly gentlemen with peculiar dress sense, trying to pretend that they haven't passed retirement age. Though they frequently like to use the we-reflect-the-public argument, a public that reflects them is too extraordinary to contemplate. Can you imagine whole stadia full of theatre critics? Could David Lynch conjure up such a scene?

Are they pure and incorruptible judges, sitting austerely aloof from the tawdry stewpots of the theatre? Quite the opposite. Show the critics the slightest glimpse of a stewpot and they're in there before you can say conflict of interest. I doubt that any of them would stoop to taking money for a good review, but they don't half appreciate a barrel load of fawning.

I remember when one critic wrote to me complaining that, at other fringe venues, he was welcomed and treated well, and that this "helped". And there was me thinking it was about the work.

Do they have a vision? This may seem an absurd question. And yet every great critic from Aristotle down to Lester Bangs has had a fierce dream of what their beloved art should be. It is that dream and its articulation against which the practitioners have to define themselves. It is the vision of the critic that helps shape what we do. Does this present bunch have one? Well, yes. But unfortunately, it's pointing in the wrong direction - backwards. In a profession dominated by old men who have been sitting in the same chairs for 30 years, most of their dreams are dreams of the past, and most of their desire is to return there. The stiff, formal acting; the heavy, didactic plays; the wallowing in suffering; the brittle wit - these are what earn the superlatives of our present critics, and this is what blocks the future. There are a few young critics with an authentic vision. Even though it is all too full of plate-spinning, video screens and jerky movement for my taste, at least it smells of the new.

What is the critic's principal virtue? An easy one, this: endurance. Heaven alone knows how they manage to go to the theatre five nights a week, 50 weeks a year, 30 or 40 years on the trot. If I ever had to entrust a secret with anyone, knowing that they were going to have to withstand the most evil tortures known to man, I would entrust it to a drama critic.

Anyone who can sit through Jean Genet's The Maids just once without committing homicide merits an award for bravery. But to survive ten or 15 different productions in a lifetime, and at varying degrees of slowness, is way beyond anything the SAS could produce. But what sort of mentality does this elongated agony produce? And how far does this seclusion in darkened rooms take the victim away from reality?

What is the prime motivating force behind the critics' judgements? This is where the real problem lies. It's fear. Fear of the new, fear of the bold, fear of the original, fear of the brave. If anything shows a spark of a future, that draws out their greatest venom. This is the funny sort of review that just shouts: "No, no, we don't want this in our world. Let's stop this happening." You would have thought that going on the same circuit of shows for 30 years would induce a desperate thirst for the new. But quite the opposite: it induces a complete psychological dependence on what has gone before, a need for the reassurance of the previous. The critics like everything contained in small concealed boxes, all pre-stamped by them. They know what the Royal Shakespeare Company should do, what the Royal Court should do, what the Bush Theatre should do. If ever a writer, a director or a theatre tries to do something new, they scream and stamp their feet as if their sanity depends on it not happening. Which it probably does.

This is the fear that crippled my show, and it's the fear that is slowly disabling much of our theatre and the rest of our culture. It is only in times of fearlessness that we can move forward. For a brief, happy, few years in the 1990s, theatres got ahead of the critics and the audiences and started dictating the pace. Everybody enjoyed the freedom, the energy and the boldness. The artist was at the front, and the rules were constantly being remade.

Then the momentum slowed and the critics inched their way forward, laying down their limiting and confining definitions. Now, they seem to hog all three lanes of the motorway, cruising along at 40 miles an hour, like ageing couples on a Sunday afternoon drive with their sandwiches and their Thermoses, grimly defying the pent-up energy behind them.

And what do they occasionally allow to squeeze through? What they feel safe with: small art, tight art, closed art. Neat, ugly little plays about neurosis or power games or the territorial imperative. Glib parcels of Broadway smartness, or their pallid English imitations. Misanthropic soaps masquerading as art. Plays that promote the idea of a pervasive ugliness or lack of hope, with little patches of slick redemption stitched on at the end. Although this might accord with the universe of someone who has to sit sweating in the same aisle seat for 30 years, it is not the world. But if anyone tries the opposite - to write bold, healthy, large plays replete with potential and possibilities - then they are spat on. Undoubted genius that he is, Harold Pinter is not the only cartographer of the human condition writing at present. Yet he is the one whose maps most closely resemble that of the critic. For the others, for Arden, Storey, Barker, Bond, Griffiths and now Wallace, though they have a home in the world and in the hearts of the audience, they must live in exile, because their expanse throws up a frightening mirror to the shrivelled spirits of an inappropriate few.

This is a depletion that diminishes everybody. What can we hope for? It is hard to tell. Although it would be good for the old men to step aside, because they are creating an old audience beyond them, it is doubtful that they will have the grace to do so. But those coming up beneath, with a few honourable exceptions, are hardly expansive in their capacity for understanding and illumination. A return to the criticism that reports rather than opines, a return of respect for something the critic is unable to do - would that be possible? No, I can't see that happening. The writers will go on making one sort of future; the critics will go on trying to construct another. I know which one I would prefer to live in.

Dominic Dromgoole is artistic director of the Oxford Stage Company. His book, The Full Room: an A-Z of contemporary playwriting, is published by Methuen (£8.99)

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