A critic writes - It's not as easy as it looks. Michael Coveney on an attempt by a colleague to write a play

Jeremy Kingston, an urbane and highly readable theatre critic on the Times, has written a play called Making Dickie Happy, about a fictional encounter in 1922 between Noel Coward, Agatha Christie and Lord ("Dickie") Mountbatten. The piece, being staged at the Rosemary Branch Theatre on the border between Hackney and Islington in north London, is quite fun, if a little arch, and examines some sexual undercurrents and overtones on the eve of Dickie's marriage to Edwina, with Christie locked into her own creative mini-crisis and Coward stirring the cocktail, not to mention the cocktail waiter.

It is odd to find such a brittle, bohemian scenario in fringe theatre, and odder still to find it written by a critic - because critics are, by common definition, objective outsiders, naysayers, curmudgeons and apparently, in the recent words of A A Gill, "cliquey, partisan, grudging and star-struck".

So much for A A Gill. I'm with the late, great Coral Browne, who declared, on seeing a huge golden phallus wheeled on to the stage during the final dress rehear-sal of Seneca's Oedipus at the Old Vic: "Well, it's nobody I know, ducky." Or perhaps, in this case, Dickie. Most critics I know are fairly well-adjusted, reasonably fulfilled individuals with a passion for theatre, but also for children, music, gardening, drinking, boating and horse- riding. And one or two of them even write plays.

The image is the opposite, I admit, of Robert Robinson's stereotype of the shop-soiled malcontent taking the last bus home to Muswell Hill. And while I do know of one or two critics who bear some vague grudge against the world because of a rejected manuscript or two, most of those who try to scratch out more than their columnar abrasions eventually achieve some satisfaction.

Yet, however unfair, the notion of the critic as artist manque has a long and distinguished history. The late Hans Keller, a notable music critic, alleged that all critics evince negative fervour more easily than positive fervour, and he diagnosed the whole tribe as victims of J C Flugel's Polycrates Complex, "which drives us to find smallness in greatness: we do not readily allow man to presume above his station, and if he is a demonstrable genius, our only remaining hope is that as a person, as a human being, he was a nasty piece of work".

While such hatchet jobs as Paul Johnson's work on Brecht or Arianna Stassi-nopoulos's book on Picasso would seem to bear this out, a former colleague of Kingston's on the Times, Irving Wardle, suggested in his book on theatre criticism that bitterness is only half the story. His point was that critics are not "as good as" artists, but that their starting motive is the same: "They write notices, as other people write plays, because they can do it - not to work off the Polycrates Complex."

When I went to see Kingston's play, I happened to bump into Wardle. He wrote a very good play some years ago called The Houseboy - based on his sexually eye-opening experiences as a music student - and he told me that he is working on a book about the "artist type", the critic or participant with a taste for something he cannot quite manage himself.

The greater the critic, the greater the poignancy of this. Tom Stoppard once said that he would as happily read Edmund Wilson on Sophocles as read Sophocles himself. Anatole France said that the life of a critic was a journey through masterpieces (if only!), and Orson Welles greeted the arrival of Kenneth Tynan, the greatest critic since George Bernard Shaw, with a robust seal of approval: "You know how to cheer, you are not afraid to hiss, you are audible (to put it mildly) and transparently in love."

Yet Tynan, the subject of a new play at the Royal Shakespeare Company (the second since he died in 1980), was never satisfied with being a great critic. Even as he started, in 1950, he said that "when maturity overtakes me, I shall have a great many less important but weightier things to do than sit trembling in theatres". He was indeed a brilliant literary manager at the National Theatre; he produced the controversial nude revue Oh! Calcutta! (a disguised title - "Oh, quel cul t'as!" - that flattered his spanking habit); and he was arguably the best essayist in English on any subject since William Hazlitt.

But did any of that supersede his value and achievement as a theatre critic? No. It is the lot, and perhaps the tragedy, of the great critic to remain just that. William Archer, a friend of Shaw and critical champion of Ibsen, was not content with transforming the theatre of his day through impassioned argument. At the age of 63, an idea for a play came to him in a dream; the resultant melodrama, The Green Goddess, was a rollicking commercial hit, first on Broadway and then in the West End.

The only critics who have hit the jackpot recently are the poet James Fenton and the lyricist Herbert Kretzmer, both thanks to Les Miserables. Fenton wrote lyrics that were eventually discarded, but he retained a share of all box-office grosses, while Kretzmer - with a good track record of musicals such as Our Man Crichton and The Four Musketeers - finished the job. Oh, and Sheridan Morley has done very well out of his Noel Coward and Gertie Lawrence cabaret.

So good luck to Kingston. With a less strenuous production and a bit of star casting, Making Dickie Happy could make Jeremy jolly, and perhaps a bit of lolly. But I reckon that in ten years' time, I'd still rather read his collected reviews than agitate for this play's revival in one of my own.

Making Dickie Happy is at the Rosemary Branch Theatre, London N13 (020 7704 6665) until 3 October

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