From Back Row to Stage: Why a Theatre Critic Started Writing Plays

I have reviewed 832 productions. I have sat in the back row for every single one. I have a notebook and a pen that I replace every September, whether it needs it or not. I have opinions. I have, on occasion, been wrong—though you won’t find many critics who’ll say that aloud.

What you won’t find in any programme, in any byline, in any archived arts section, is a play. My play. The Last Row. Until now.

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The Distance We Keep

Critics are supposed to maintain distance. That’s the job. We’re not cheerleaders. We’re not coaches. We’re observers, and the best observers sit far enough away that the stage lights don’t reach them.

I took that further than most. I built a career on distance. Emotional distance, physical distance, artistic distance. I could write three thousand words about a production without once using the word “I.” I could dismantle a performance with surgical precision and still make my deadline. I was good at it. I was proud of it.

And then, two years ago, I started writing something I couldn’t explain. It wasn’t a review. It wasn’t an essay. It was a script. My script. A play about a man who builds a theatre in his basement and fills it with mannequins because the real theatre won’t have him.

I didn’t tell anyone. Not my editor. Not my ex‑wife. Not the daughter who barely calls. I wrote it in the gaps between deadlines, late at night, in a room with the curtains drawn. I told myself it was an exercise. A thought experiment. I was wrong.

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What the Back Row Doesn’t Give You

Here is what I learned, somewhere around page sixty: writing a play is nothing like reviewing one.

When you’re a critic, you arrive after everything has been decided. The script is finished. The actors are cast. The set is built. Your job is to respond—to measure what you see against what you expected, and to articulate the gap. You have power, but it’s the power of the aftermath. You can’t change anything. You can only describe it.

Writing is the opposite. Writing is making something where nothing was. Writing is sitting in a room at 2 a.m. with a cursor blinking and the terrible knowledge that no one is going to save you. You have to make the choices. You have to decide what matters. You have to risk being bad, being wrong, being seen.

I didn’t understand that until I’d written the first act. And when I did, I looked back at thirty years of reviews and thought: I’ve been punishing people for doing something I was too afraid to try.

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The Night Everything Changed

I submitted The Last Row to a small fringe theatre. They accepted it. They cast it. They scheduled an opening night.

Eighty minutes before curtain, the cast walked out.

They didn’t quit the play. They quit me. I had given them notes during warm‑up. I had corrected their breathing. I had told one of them his interpretation was, and I quote, “aggressively wrong.” I was the critic, even when the play was my own. I couldn’t stop being what I’d been for thirty years.

So I did the only thing left. I went on stage. With one understudy, a stage manager who wouldn’t flatter me, and a lighting tech who accidentally played a thunderclap during rehearsal. I performed my own words for an audience of strangers.

I forgot a line. I told the audience I’d forgotten. Someone in the back row—my row—laughed. Not at me. With me. And something cracked open that I’m still trying to name.

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Why I’m Sharing This Now

The Last Row is a play about distance. The distance between performer and spectator. Between critic and artist. Between the person we present to the world and the person we are when no one is watching.

It’s also a play about what happens when that distance collapses.

I don’t know if I’ll ever perform again. I don’t know if the play will have a life beyond that one chaotic, beautiful, terrifying night. But I do know this: the back row isn’t the safest place in the theatre. It’s the loneliest. And I’m done hiding there.

If you’ve ever been afraid to make something, to share something, to step onto a stage—real or metaphorical—this play is for you.

The first two scenes are online now. More are coming. After that? We’ll see. The lights are still on.

— Martin Vale
Critic, playwright, and, for one night only, performer.