Entertainment

AS EVER, A GENTLEMAN

CLIVE BARNES had all the traits that George Bernard Shaw said a great critic must possess.

He knew his Shakespeare backward and forward, as well as his Sophocles, Ibsen, Chekhov and Congreve. He read the great novels, saw all of the great operas, loved classical music, was an expert on dance and knew one or two things about painting.

MORE: Death Of A Legend

EDITORIAL: Clive Barnes

It was this vast knowledge – and deep love – of all the arts (to say nothing of pop culture – he treasured his Beatles albums) that underpinned Clive’s sound judgments as a theater and dance critic for 63 years, 31 of them at this paper.

“I’ve run longer than ‘Cats,’ ” he once said. “And I’m gaining on the Rockettes.”

But what I valued most about Clive was something else Shaw said a critic must have – “a lively and pleasing writing style.”

At his best, Clive was a witty and vivid writer, never pompous and often downright impish. “The Neil Simon and Burt Bacharach musical ‘Promises, Promises’ came to the Sam S. Shubert Theatre last night and fulfilled them all without a single breach,” he tossed off in 1968.

Reviewing the original production of “Hair,” which detractors sniffed was a show about “dirty-looking hippies,” Clive ended his positive notice: “Incidentally, the cast washes.”

Writing about a production of “As You Like It” starring Raul Julia, Mary Beth Hurt, Kathleen Widdoes and Meat Loaf, Clive, then at the New York Times, adhered strictly to the paper’s stylebook, listing the cast as: “Mr. Julia, Ms. Hurt, Ms. Widdoes and Mr. Loaf.”

All of those reviews, I should point out, were knocked off in less than an hour.

Clive started reviewing when critics still attended opening nights, rushed up the aisle before the curtain came down and banged out their copy for the first edition. And Clive did it without breaking a sweat, often joking with copy boys and editors while he wrote.

“You were at the mercy of your opening paragraph,” he once told me. “You typed away, and when you were finished with a page, a copy boy took it. There was no chance to revise it. There was no time to check something in a reference book. You went to the typewriter naked.”

Two things informed Clive’s light, chatty tone: the fun he had as a journalist in London during the Swinging Sixties; and his reverence for Kenneth Tynan, the legendary critic who tore into the stodgy British theater of the early 1950s with vigorous, bracing prose.

“Ken Tynan was my hero,” Clive said when I interviewed him on “Theater Talk” in 2005. “The generation of critics before him was quite pompous. He came along and shook everything up. The

terrifying thing was that we were the same age, and had worked at the same paper in school. He was such a formidable theater critic. I think that’s why I first became a dance critic. I did not want to compete with Ken Tynan.”

When Clive arrived in New York in 1964, many critics, especially at the Times, had an old-fashioned and, to our ears today, stilted prose style.

“They wrote things like, ‘In this critic’s opinion’ or ‘From this corner’ – whatever ‘this corner’ was,” Clive recalled.

He merrily tore up the New York Times stylebook by becoming the first writer to use the first-person pronoun in the paper’s history.

“I slipped ‘I’ into the review, and then rushed home and sat by the telephone, fully expecting the managing editor to ring me up,” he recalled. “But nothing. Not a peep. Three days later, I used ‘I’ again. Eventually, everyone else more or less came round to it.”

Clive joined The Post in 1977 and reinvigorated this paper’s arts coverage, churning out thousands of words a week on theater and dance.

He was a brand-name critic, as famous as the performers he wrote about.

Press agents told me that when they conducted focus groups and asked theatergoers if they knew the names of any critics, Clive always came out way ahead of his colleagues.

Though by nature a gentleman, Clive was, like all great critics, deft with the knife. I wonder if they had to hide the razor blades when Julia Roberts read this about her Broadway debut in “Three Days of Rain”: “Hated the play. To be sadly honest, even hated her. At least I liked the rain – even if three days of it can seem an eternity.”

“I always took the line that I could cut my grandmother’s throat,” Clive said. “That’s the function of a critic.”

In person, Clive was as much fun and impish as his prose. He had a great store of anecdotes and never took himself or his power too seriously.

Two weeks into his job as a critic in New York, legendary producer David Merrick, who loved to bait critics, sent him a telegram: “The honeymoon is over.” Clive responded: “Dear David: I didn’t know we were married. I didn’t even know you were that kind of a boy!”

Once, in a cab, the driver recognized his voice (Clive had been on the radio for many years). The driver said: “I know that voice. You’re Clive Barnes. Tell me. That accent. What is it? English, gay or just affected?”

Clive loved being a critic, and although his profession has taken some hits recently, with newspapers cutting back on arts coverage, he always said his was the best job you could have on a paper.

“You get paid to follow your hobby,” he said. “And you always know what you’re going to write about. You can say, ‘I was at the theater last night’ – and just take it from there.”