The new British musical Loserville is closing early in London's West End, and some think that critics are to blame. On his regular blog on the Stage website, Mark Shenton reports that a director (not Loserville's) messaged him to say that its failure to shift tickets was "almost entirely due to those slightly overweight white, male, middle-class critics in their late-50s who closed it."

The male, pale and stale debate about critics has been aired before, most notably by National Theatre artistic director Nicholas Hytner. But whichever side of that debate you come down on, it's absurd to think that British theatre critics have the power to kill shows. Or indeed that they would get any pleasure in deliberately doing so. Still less, it might be argued, do they have a particular duty to support any work on patriotic grounds.

More than a decade ago, my colleague Michael Billington wrote an excellent piece following Donald Sutherland's critical drubbing in a West End show, in which he quoted the director Eric Thompson who had been involved in the disastrous Lloyd-Webber/Ayckbourn premiere of Jeeves. Thompson was asked by an interviewer "Did the critics kill the show?" With great honesty, Thompson replied: "No, the show killed the show."

Critics can make some contribution in turning a show into a success. A slew of rave reviews can help at the box office, of course – but it is not the critic's job to sell tickets. If it is the show that kills a show, it is audiences who makes shows into smashes. They are the final arbiters of West End success. The long-lived Les Misérables is testament to that.

Other long-runners such as We Will Rock You succeed because they crack the marketing, the pricing and get the crucial word of mouth to a particular demographic. Ticket buyers for We Will Rock You won't give a monkeys about the press reviews, and may not even know that they exist – still less that they were, on the whole, terrible. In the end, it's the audience that keeps a show open or closes it. They are the ones with the power, and you can't blame them for exercising it.