Have you heard the one about the ballet critic and the dog poo? In February the Hanover State Opera’s ballet director Marco Goecke was so incensed by a bad review written by the Frankfurter Allgemeine ballet critic Wiebke Hüster that he tracked her down in public and smeared the excrement of Gustav, his 14-year-old dachshund, in her face. Now, I think we can all agree that as reactions to criticism go, it’s a bad one.
Goecke later described his attack on Hüster, with an astounding degree of understatement, as “certainly not super”. He also refused to apologise, describing his cack-handed actions as the result of years of “annihilatory criticism”. As excuses go, Marco, that one’s crap.
