Terry Teachout's capacity for making connections made him a great critic

Years ago, I received an unsolicited lecture from a national newspaper critic nearing retirement. During a wintry interval, a friend and I were discussing the theatre Twitter question-du-jour: should critics applaud? Overheard, we were accosted by a senior figure. “The answer is no,” he hollered. Critics, he declared, should give no clue to their reaction during press nights, lest they surreptitiously influence one another. No laughing, no crying, no clapping – just a scurried exit into the night. Criticism – for a ‘name’ critic, at least – was the art of the poker face.

I thought this month of that poker-faced critic – so wrong, so harsh – while mourning the sudden death of my friend and mentor Terry Teachout, who was the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal for nearly 20 years. Terry wept at press nights; he gasped, he cheered. Peter Marks, Terry’s colleague from the Washington Post, this week described hearing Terry’s laugh soar from the auditorium “like a whooping crane in heat”.

Terry was an ‘elite’ critic in the best sense: a rich reserve of cultural memory, a doyen of historical context, a man of high standards who penned tough reviews. But his total immersion in every performance that he attended spoke to something else, which made him a great critic: a deep need to connect with community. That meant a readiness, each time he entered a theatre, to respond entirely openly to the hard work of the artists present. It also drove his extraordinary capacity for friendships.

I was introduced to Terry by a mutual friend, the conservative US historian Richard Brookhiser. I was working as a regular junior for the Times in London; I was also often in New York. Richard knew how committed Terry was to mentoring young critics and guessed we would hit it off. Like Brookhiser, Terry was an influential interlocutor in reformist Republican thought.

He was a conservative in the sense that he privileged art that engaged strongly with tradition, was wary of the mob and the culture of the collective and, when it came to legislative politics, sceptical of the power of the state. None of this was at odds with despising Donald Trump or practising social inclusion. It did, however, inform Terry’s deep political commitment to the American dramatic tradition.

For years, whenever I planned a New York trip, I would fix a theatre date with Terry. Widowed at the beginning of the pandemic, he spent much of lockdown alone, but still made new friends. On one of my long calls to check he was okay, Terry held up the telephone to his apartment wall so I could hear the cellist who practised next door. Some would have complained about the noise; Terry befriended him, thanked him for the music, and asked for encores. Despite his devotion to his late wife Hilary, it was no surprise that in his final months, Terry had found love again. He was too open a heart to build walls around his soul; too immersive a theatregoer not to search, each day, for new moments of connection.