The Critics’ Circle
Protecting and promoting cultural criticism since 1913
The Critics’ Circle believes impartial, professional criticism of the arts is an essential ingredient of a healthy society. The Circle today has 503 members shared between Theatre (117), Music (91), Film (151), Dance (57), Visual Arts (47) and Books (40). Admission to the Circle is by invitation from the Council.
Since 1988 the Circle has presented each year the Service to Art Rosebowl to an artist of conspicuous achievement. In 2015 the members voted for Dame Maggie Smith, in 2016 for Matthew Bourne.
The sections make their own awards in ceremonies which are significant social occasions, and hold periodic meetings and lunches to discuss their awards, propose new members, debate current issues and meet artists.
President: Mark Shenton
Vice-President: Mark Pullinger
Hon. General Secretary: Rick Jones criticscircleallsections@gmail.com
Hon. Treasurer: Peter Cargin
Trustees: Ian Herbert, Michael Billington, Peter Cargin
News & reviews
Battle of Hastings
For more than a hundred years, pianists have been doing battle in the seaside town of Hastings on the south coast of England. Originally, the competition featured local players in the context of a general music festival but eventually the keyboard section became...
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Book Review – Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
In Ayad Akhtar’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Disgraced, his principle character, Amir, a Pakistani-American lawyer, admits feeling a “blush of pride” at 9/11. Akhtar was exploring the crisis of identity felt by many Muslim-Americans in the wake of the terror...
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Turner the Contemporary
The public know Turner as a painter of landscapes capturing light, weather, mist, storms and, in the words of his fellow artist John Constable, of painting with ‘tinted steam’. Yet Tate Britain’s current exhibition Turner’s Modern World reveals the artist in a whole...
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A new career for painter Philip Sutton – aged 92
The colourist painter Philip Sutton was 92 on October 20, and is using his experiences of eight months in lockdown to embark on the next phase of his career – as a gallerist. With several planned exhibition cancelled since February, Sutton is taking exhibiting his...
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Purcell Odes: The English Concert, St John’s Smith Square
Melancholy never seems far away from any concert these days, and the final celebratory piece aside, the English Concert gave us a Purcell programme to milk it. St John’s, completely cleared of furniture, the orchestra luxuriously spaced in the wide-open nave, a very...
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