Overachiever

The man is a lion of prides. The mane is wayward and unhatted. The massive head and frame are by Hogarth, the voluminous suit by Khrushchev's tailor. An excess of ergs twitches his head and fingers; the English hair and teeth, the cockney-of-the-walk intonations announce his presence in the densest lobby crush. In the past two years, the New York Times's Clive Barnes has become a public character, the most theatrical and prolific critic since the days of Alexander Woollcott.

He is not only the Times drama critic but its dance critic as well. He revisits hits to make sure audiences are getting their money's worth. He often has simultaneous reviews in the same edition; once he had four, an event that occasioned a different kind of criticism--from management. They conspired to persuade him to relinquish one job, but ended by giving him two offices, one in which to compose ballet reviews, the other for batting out theater pieces--carried throughout the U.S. on the N.Y. Times News Service.

Soot and Dickens. In addition to his twin assignments, Barnes teaches a course in critical writing at New York University, writes a monthly column for Holiday, flies over 100,000 miles a year on the lecture circuit, appears on educational television, and dictates a monthly contribution to the British periodical Dance and Dancers.

After William Butler Yeats met Oscar Wilde, he wrote: "I never before heard a man talking sentences as if he had written them all overnight." Barnes is Wilde's mirror image. His written work reads as if he had just spoken it. The criticism, the speeches, the conversation tumble out with blithe facility as if on a reel of four-track tape. One wonders whether there will be an end to it: it seems unbelievable that there was a beginning.

There was. "I was your typical working-class overachiever," says Barnes. Like soot and Dickens, he is a London slum product. His father, an ambulance driver, deserted Mum when Clive was seven. The brilliant, chunky lad played his part well in school; a scholarship helped him into Oxford's postwar meritocracy, along with Director Tony Richardson and Sunday Times Arts Columnist Alan Brien. As soon as Brien had a leg up on Fleet Street, he brought along his protege. Barnes' reputation for fluency was instantly evidenced in music, drama and dance criticism."He just liked to turn on a verbal tap," recalls Brien, "bottle the words that come out and then begin filling the next bottle."

London Lisp. The stuff in the bottles sparkled. The New York Times began to buy small pieces in 1963, in 1965 invited him to be its staff dance critic. For Barnes, the deadlines were lifelines; the city was home. "From childhood," he claims, "I had inhaled imported U.S. culture in films and drama. I was immediately Americanized."

Well, almost. The supporting actor who was playing Clive Barnes in the early New York days was considerably different from the star who plays him now. In his first few months on the job, listeners to the Times radio station WQXR were astonished to hear a London lisp on the evening news: "Thith ith Cloive Bawneth, dawnthe cvitic of the New Yawk Timeth." A put-on, many decided. But the speech defect was real. The speaker, moreover, was as straight as a line of type. After shedding his first wife of ten years, Barnes married Patricia Winckley, a lithe balletomane who looked like a swan on leave from St. James's Park. In New York, the Barneses and their two children, Christopher, 7, and Maya, 5, settled into a sprawling pad on Riverside Drive. The overachiever brushed up his diction, stiffened his self-assurance and pressed on.

Even before Barnes became drama critic, his appetite for theatrical performances was notorious. "If you dimmed the lights in a car," says a fellow critic, "Clive would have tried to review it." Two years ago, after Howard Taubman succeeded Brooks Atkinson and Stanley Kauffmann succeeded Taubman, the New York Times turned to Clive Barnes. His first reviews ran on heedlessly, as Barnes reviewed the theater, the audience, the seats. But by the following season he was as relaxed as an actor in the second year of a hit comedy, still babbling, but in the manner of a relaxed and witty raconteur.

Drama Ghetto. The harder he worked, the heavier he grew--and the bigger target he made. "If I decide to stay around Broadway beyond the current season," griped Producer David Merrick, "it will be for the pleasure of throwing his fat limey posterior out in the street." Fellow Critic John Simon fulminated in New York Magazine: "The APA production of The Misanthrope is as bad as . . . as . . . it is hard to find an adequately monstrous simile. As bad--let me try--as its review by Clive Barnes." Dance and Music Critic B. H. Haggin briskly summed up Barnes' critical efforts as "uncomprehending nonsense." The critic's critics have not been entirely unjust. Barnes' manic dance criticism often reads more like promotion than analysis. And frequently a drama review will come down with logorrhea simply because he didn't have time to write a short one.

Now that New York City has but three major newspapers, Barnes has unprecedented authority, even for a Times critic. His raves can light up marquees for two years; his pans have flushed million-dollar musicals into the Hudson River. Staking out territory where first-stringers rarely used to tread, he helped revitalize off Broadway, formerly the ghetto of drama. "Today," Barnes believes, off Broadway "is the last place where a writer has the freedom to fail."

Talent of Enthusiasm. If his prose is ephemeral, his insights and images are not. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, he wrote, "has the dust of thought about it, and the particles glitter excitingly in the theatrical air." In a review of The Boys in the Band, he observed, "The New York wit is little more than a mixture of Jewish humor and homosexual humor seen through the bottom of a dry-martini glass." Krapp's Last Tape, he said, "is a masterpiece of pauses--Beckett cares so much for silence that he erects his plays around it." His negative comments are in the Benchley tradition. A one-word review of an English play called The Cupboard: "Bare." No one enjoys throwing custard pies at his own image more than Barnes himself. He constantly claims that Americans give critics too much power. "A Barbary ape could have this position and awe people," he says. "Barbary apes are not irreplaceable."

Perhaps, but no one has yet been found who could ape Clive Barnes. It would take a team to turn out his week's work, and none of it, it seems, would have his wit or fluency. Most important--to audiences and to the theater itself--none would have his enthusiasm. "My ideal criticism is to write a notice about a play that I didn't like," he says, "and yet send people to the theater to see it."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.