I FULLY endorse the comments made by Dr Brenda Watson regarding the review of Camille (Your Letters, May 23).

A similar piece last week failed completely to get the measure of Ibsen's psychological drama, The Master Builder.

If the complex mental states - guilt, remorse, hope, ambition - portrayed in the play, and which still resonate with the experience of our lives, can simply be written off by describing the characters as "bonkers" or "barmy" (to say nothing of the temptation to urge them "to pull themselves together") then clearly, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beckett, Pinter etc. have all wasted their time.

On this view, Hamlet should have been sent away for counselling and we need never have bothered to go to the theatre in the first place!

Not to mince words, I felt the piece was ill-informed, ill-judged and rather irresponsible but it has wider and far more serious implications than the view taken of a single production.

Your reviewer shouldn't worry too much about how the play will be received in the West End, which I am sure can well take care of itself.

What should concern him and what concerns me - and, I suspect, many others in and around Malvern - is whether we shall continue to have the opportunity of seeing productions and actors of this calibre if you merely damn them with faint praise and thus undermine what the theatre management is seeking to achieve.

The record of productions in recent years is a cause for celebration, and yes, while intelligent criticism is both necessary and justified, the theatre deserves all the support we can give it.

TOM GAMMAGE, Cowleigh Bank, Malvern.