"Are critics necessary?" a good many people ask, not a few of them the butts of some kind of criticism. Certainly if dray horses, victims of he whip, could speak, the answer would be No. Even someone who surely knows better, Samuel Beckett, arrogates to himself the fun of making the supreme insult meted out between his contentious tramps be "Crritic," with a double R, to make it more explosive. But playwrights, direc…
SOURCE: John Simon at 09:18PM on January 22, 2018