The doyen of London critics has died

Friends are reporting the death this morning of the veteran Financial Times ballet critic Clement Crisp.

He was 90, and inimitable.

Alastair Macaulay writes: His first words to me (in March 1979) were “You’re Mary’s friend Alastair!” referring to our colleague Mary Clarke, with whom he had already written at least four books and with whom he then wrote many more. He began writing for the “Financial Times” around 1958, became its chief dance critic in 1973 (replacing his old friend Andrew Porter, who had been its chief critic of music and dance since the early 1950s), and remained there until his retirement, due to sudden and lasting ill health, in 2018: a longevity of constant eloquence, authority, scholarship, and staggering wit.
One “FT” colleague loved to quote the 1988 review in which Clement wrote “In this work, Second Stride may be said to be ‘into’ world religion in the sense that a bull is ‘into’ a china shop.” Matthew Bourne enjoyed one Crisp review of his own “Highland Fling” saying that his sylphs looked like “manic dirty laundry” and of the dancers in an earlier Bourne work resembling “the rugby team from Lesbos”. My own go-to Clement quote was the opening line of a 1980 review of Maurice Béjart’s triple bill of “Firebird”, “Petrushka”, “Rite of Spring”: “Béjart and Stravinsky is one of those fabled partnerships, like Romeo and Goneril or bacon and strawberries.”