Gear up for a showdown

Literary critic, Peter Craven has gone after Alison Croggon in a blistering attack on her recent profile of playwright Joanna Murray-Smith.

"Croggon's piece is an odious piece of work and has caused widespread dismay," he writes in Crikey today. "This so-called profile is an extraordinary case of poisoning the wells and it is also a category mistake. Alison Croggon has written a hatchet job opinion piece and served it up as a profile in a way that (if it were to set up a precedent) would make anyone apprehensive of an arts interviewer."

The article More bubble bath than kitchen sink which was published in The Australian states that Murray-Smith's writing "seems like privileged whingeing".

Croggon goes on to say that "it's certainly true that Murray-Smith's plays have consistently focused on the upper middle classes. As one critic put it, it's a world that is 'fairly smug and comfortable', peopled by characters who are 'articulate, have every material advantage and a highly developed sense of their own anguish'."

Craven believes that "Alison Croggon has not ridden into battle, all colours flying, she has presented this attack under camouflage of the conventional profile and in such a way that The Australian may not have realised quite how poisonous the portrait was. Much of the article sounds like an interview where a fair fraction of it is made up of cobbled together quotes taken out of context."

He likens her article to profiles written by Lynn Barber of The Observer (notThe Guardian, as the Crikey article states).

But Craven also points out that the article is no surprise given that "Croggon despises a world in which Joanna Murray-Smith is performed by actresses like Diana Rigg or Eileen Atkins, at places like Britain's National Theatre...This is the world of Mammon to her. It represents the meretricious glow of the bright lights of the big city."

I am not going to get into the debate from south of the border, but I urge Sydney-siders to line up and watch this match play out. We don't really have this rough and tumble debate, which I actually love and applaud on both Craven and Croggon's side.

Hopefully it moves on from the 'you shouldn't have said that' type of old white men defence and into something a bit more chewable.

Ding ding. Let round three begin!