"In London they don't like you if you're still alive"

A wry jab and a shield at once, the line distills a long-standing cultural paradox: admiration in London, especially within its storied theatre and arts circles, often arrives most lavishly when the subject can no longer answer back. It lampoons the city’s reverence for legacy, its blue plaques, museums, busts, and memorials, contrasted with the suspicion that greets the living figure who still has the audacity to change, to fail, or to argue with the critics. The dead are tidy; the living are messy.

British reserve looms large behind the quip. Public enthusiasm here tends to be measured and earned over time, while self-promotion or loud success can provoke a reflex of skepticism. The tall-poppy instinct slices through hype, and nothing attracts the pruning shears like a thriving career on center stage. In that climate, revivals and the canon frequently feel safer to audiences and producers than new voices that might reroute tradition. To be alive is to be provisional; to be dead is to be settled.

Theatre intensifies the point. London’s critics are famously incisive, its audiences sophisticated and merciless in equal measure. A new play by a breathing artist invites contention; a classic by a sainted predecessor invites homage. Fierstein’s joke carries an aftertaste of bruises collected on press nights, the kind every playwright learns to metabolize into humor.

Yet the barb cuts beyond London. The line speaks to a wider habit of posthumous love: only once an artist can no longer offend or falter do we grant them uncomplicated esteem. The living threaten our categories; the dead decorate our walls.

Under the laughter lies a plea. Admiration that waits for a eulogy is a poor investment in culture. If we must venerate, let it be for those who still risk the flop, who revise tomorrow what dazzled today, who remain gloriously, provocatively alive.