It seems extraordinary that arguably the leading actor of the past 50 years, Ian McKellen, and certainly the most distinguished theatre critic, Irving Wardle, who has died aged 93, should both have cut their teeth on the same northern amateur stage, the Bolton Little theatre.
Irving’s father, John Wardle, a librarian and drama critic on the Bolton Evening News, had co-founded the Little in 1931 along with several like-minded colleagues. Irving saw his first play there, in 1937 – a children’s play, Fifinella, by the producer and director Basil Dean, in which three young “plants” interrupted the show to declare it was rubbish. He was aware, he said in retrospect, that “as soon as the dramatic pretence begins, it generates a force field that becomes as tangible as barbed wire if anyone tries to walk through it”.
That sentence, which appeared in a memoir he wrote in 2012 in Intelligent Life magazine, was typical of his easy, unshowy ability to go to the heart of live performance and its special fragility. This sensitivity qualified him as an ideal commentator on the European theatre of Brecht, Pirandello and the French surrealists, for whom ideas of performance and reality were in constant conflict.
He was in exactly the right place, too, to chart the golden age of postwar British theatre, with the coming of John Osborne and Harold Pinter, the RSC, the Royal Court and the National, all between 1956 and 1962, then see them through their first decades, as critic on the Times from 1963 to 1989. Before that he had been deputy critic to Kenneth Tynan on the Observer from 1959.
Like all the reviews on the Times arts page, his superbly wrought, muscularly argued reviews were cloaked in anonymity. But, soon after Michael Billington joined the Times as Wardle’s deputy in 1965, the pipe-smoking, usually tie-less, leather jacketed, tensile scribe on the aisle was outed.
The force field of theatre collided with the nervous energy emanating from the always alert and concentrating Irv, whose oeuvre in the stalls was accompanied, oblivious to the first night cheeriness and back-slapping around him, by stony silence, a rummage in his tool bag for his unfilled pipe and its vigorously applied cleaner.
As the inevitable delay to curtain-up continued, and the first night din increased, he would start cracking his knuckles – a terrible sound – which translated as “get me out of here” disapproval. On occasion, when this did not work, he would shout at the immobile curtain: “Shop!”
Then, at last, the show, the dash to the office and, mirabile dictu, 900 beautifully crafted, sober-sided analytical words for late editions the next morning. When these words were favourable, the producers would scan them with forensic dedication to extract phrases and glowing adjectives for the marketing department. Occasionally they found such nuggets, but not very often.
For Wardle was at one, temperamentally, with his great friend and hero, the critic and academic Eric Bentley, whose obituary he wrote for the Guardian in 2020, quoting, with approval, Bentley’s view that: “To say one was moved is not criticism. It is data for a fever chart.”
Irving’s father John, before moving to journalism, had been a touring actor who worked with Ben Iden Payne at Britain’s first repertory theatre, the Gaiety in Manchester. His mother, Nellie Partington, a concert pianist, died shortly after giving birth; John soon remarried, to the actor Norma Wilson, who helped him found the Little theatre.
Irving was educated at Bolton school during the second world war and at Wadham College, Oxford, before doing his national service, an experience he disliked intensely, saying that, in comparison, theatre reviewing was “a cushy number”. He remained impervious throughout his life to people pulling rank, or adopting status or position of any kind.
On completing his national service, he studied the piano at the Royal College of Music, London, and in 1956 started work as a subeditor on the Times Educational Supplement.
At the same time, he wrote a London review column for the Bolton Evening News and published there, in 1958, a reflective and highly appreciative account of Pinter’s The Birthday Party, which closed after a week at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and some awful reviews. This led to a friendship with Pinter (and the second amateur production of the play, by Irving’s stepmother, Norma).
In 1973, he wrote a black comedy, The Houseboy, based on his experience in a part-time job washing dishes in a guesthouse while studying at the RCM. Charles Marowitz directed it at his Open Space theatre in Tottenham Court Road, with Thelma Holt and Timothy West; the piece was televised on ITV in 1982.
When the Independent on Sunday was launched in 1990, Wardle was wooed away from the daily grind to a weekly column, where he prospered in familiar style, but in 1995 the paper’s failing economic fortunes necessitated staff cuts, and his job went to a freelancer.
He was subsequently a gun for hire, standing in for colleagues, or writing for magazines and theatre programmes, all the while playing the piano, taking German lessons, Pilates classes and Zumba dancing, writing scraps of dialogue for his own amusement, and latterly joining an amateur improvisation drama club. He retained his laser-like intellectual powers, and went deaf and resorted to a walking stick only at the very end of his rich and happy life in New Barnet, Hertfordshire.
His two major publications are The Theatres of George Devine (1978), which tells the story of the roots and outcome of the 20th-century British theatre through the life and career of the remarkable actor, producer and director; and Theatre Criticism (1992), a brilliantly concise survey and analysis in which he said he always tried “to refrain from saying anything about an artist that I could not, after taking a deep breath, say to his face”.
He was married three times, first to Joan Notkin in 1958, then to Fay Crowder in 1963, both marriages ending in divorce; and in 1975 to Elizabeth Grist, whom he met at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1968.
He is survived by Liz and their children, Alex and Judith, by two sons, Ben and Thomas, from his second marriage, and by eight grandchildren.
• John Irving Wardle, theatre critic, born 20 July 1929; died 23 February 2023
• This article was amended on 3 March 2023 to remove a story about Wardle’s typewriter being buried in the garden, which was not true.
