Blogging

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Notes

1 Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism for the Stage and Screen (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 9.

2 I intend blog here to mean a blogsite or website established and maintained by a single writer. Related phenomena are theatre criticism websites to which numerous writers submit reviews and other writings, for which they may or may not be paid. A further element of the theatre critical blogosphere is subject-specific sections of mainstream media outlets’ websites, which, in the case of newspapers’ websites, tend to include content from the print version augmented by web-only content.

3 Athique dates the birth of the weblog (soon shortened to ‘blog’) to 1998, ‘with the launch of online platforms (such as OpenDiary) that allowed people to publish their own updateable internet content without specific coding experience’. Adrian Athique, Digital Media and Society: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 201. Miller states that the word blog was coined in 1997. Vincent Miller, Understanding Digital Culture (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), p. 170.

4 According to Haydon, the London theatre critical blogosphere emerged in 2007, ‘when theatre blogs appeared on the internet’. Andrew Haydon, ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’, Nachtkritik.de, 24 October 2013 <http://www.nachtkritik.de/index.php?view=article&id=8662%3Aa-debate-on-theatre-criticism-and-its-crisis-in-the-uk&option=com_content&Itemid=60> [accessed 14 March 2014]. Along with Haydon, other contributors to the London theatre critical blogosphere include Maddy Costa, Chris Goode, Dan Hutton, Fin Kennedy, Catherine Love, Jake Orr, Natasha Tripney, Matt Trueman, Megan Vaughan, Webcowgirl, and the West End Whingers (who I discuss later in this piece). The group sites A Younger Theatre and Exeunt are also important generators of online criticism. I was a witness, and sometime contributor, to this emergent scene from 2007 to 2012, while in post in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. During that time, I served as deputy London theatre critic for the US entertainment magazine Variety, occasionally wrote for the Guardian’s theatre blog, and convened and spoke at numerous live events about the changing face of criticism in the digital age.

5 Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 1.

6 Athique, Digital Media and Society, p. 201.

7 Jürgen Habermas, ‘An Avantgardistic Instinct for Relevances: Intellectuals and their Public’, Publicsphere.ssrc.org <http://publicsphere.ssrc.org/habermas-intellectuals-and-their-public/> [accessed 18 March 2013].

8 For example, non-fiction writer Henry Hitchings has been theatre critic of the London Evening Standard since 2009; and broadcaster Libby Purves served as the London Times’ theatre critic from 2010 to 2013. Neither of them had a track record of written professional theatre criticism when they were appointed to these posts.

9 Jake Orr started A Younger Theatre as a personal blog in 2009; it now has five editors under the age of 26, including Orr, and serves as ‘a platform for young people to express their views on theatre and performance’. A Younger Theatre <http://www.ayoungertheatre.com/about/> [accessed 13 April 2014]. Rob Walport started the Teenage Theatre Critic blog in 2007, and renamed it the Tyro Theatre Critic in 2009 when he turned 20. The blog provided commentary on theatre and opera in first London, then New York. Tyro Theatre Critic <http://tttcritic.blogspot.ca> [accessed 13 April 2014]. Walport’s current blogging project, The Opera 101, presents itself as an introductory site about the genre and features calendars of opera performances in New York and London. The Opera 101 <http://www.theopera101.com> [accessed 13 April 2014].

10 While the majority of work written and directed on London stages is by white artists, the Tricycle, Royal Court, and National Theatres in particular have championed the work of theatre artists of colour including Bola Agbaje, Alia Bano, Lolita Chakrabarti, Rachel de-lahay, Kwame Kwei-Armah (since 2011 the artistic director of Center Stage in Baltimore, Maryland), debbie tucker green, Indhu Rubasingham (since 2013 the Tricyle’s artistic director), and Roy Williams.

11 Lovink, Zero Comments, p. 3.

12 Neal Harvey, Helena Grehan, and Joanne Tompkins, ‘“Be Thou Familiar, but by No Means Vulgar”: Australian Theatre Blogging Practice’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 20.1 (2010), 109–19 (p. 109).

13 Patrick Lonergan, e-mail to the author, 13 March 2014. I was the founding editor-in-chief of Irish Theatre Magazine, from 1998 to 2007, and Lonergan was that publication’s Reviews Editor from 2005 to 2009. The magazine moved to a fully online format in 2009. Harvey, Grehan, and Tompkins relate that for influential Australian theatre blogger Alison Croggon, ‘one of the core strengths’ of the blog form was ‘its facility to allow direct and immediate communication with the author’. Harvey, Grehan, and Tompkins, ‘“Be Thou Familiar”’, p. 111. Croggon started her Theatre Notes blog in 2004 and – in a move that underlines the self-determining and transient nature of the blog form – closed it down in 2012, because she was no longer able to juggle theatre blogging and other work as a novelist and poet. Alison Croggon, Theatre Notes <http://theatrenotes.blogspot.ca/p/biography.html> [accessed 13 April 2014].

14 Stephen D. Reese, Lou Rutigliano, Kideuk Hyuan, and Jaekwan Jeong, ‘Mapping the Blogosphere: Professional and Citizen-Based Media in the Global News Arena’, Journalism, 8.3 (2007), 235–61 (p. 240).

15 Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging (Boston: Polity, 2008), p. 1.

16 Matt Trueman, ‘Stop Surviving, Start Serving – The Future of Criticism’ <http://matttrueman.co.uk/2013/10/stop-surviving-start-serving-the-future-of-criticism.html> [accessed 18 March 2014].

17 This point about the multi-vocality of review response was informed by a Facebook exchange with Matt Trueman on 22 March 2014, for which thanks.

18 Duška Radosavljević, Theatre-Making: Interplay between Text and Performance (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 118.

19 Mark Fisher, co-chair of CATS, email to the author, 14 March 2014. As Fisher clarifies in his email, CATS is not an organization or association per se, but an awards system with approximately a dozen judges.

20 Don Rubin, President of the Canadian Theatre Critics’ Association, email to the author, 25 March 2014.

21 ATCA, ‘Apply for Membership’, American Theatre Critics Association <http://americantheatrecritics.org/apply-for-membership/> [accessed 18 March 2014].

22 The Critics’ Circle <http://www.criticscircle.org.uk/?ID=1> [accessed 27 March 2014].

23 Many thanks to Diana Damian for these points about the legitimizing potential of critics’ association membership. Diana Damian, email to the author, 25 March 2014.

24 The Whingers’ site remains active at the time of writing, with Andrew ‘on sabbatical’ and Phil writing on his own. West End Whingers <http://westendwhingers.wordpress.com> [accessed 24 March 2014].

25 Alistair Smith, ‘Survey – Critics Still Crucial to Theatre’ <http://www.thestage.co.uk/news/2010/05/survey-critics-still-crucial-to-theatre/> [accessed 24 March 2014].

26 Timothy Stephen and Teresa M. Harrison, ‘Conserve: Moving the Communication Discourse Online’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 45.10 (1994), 756–70 (p. 768).

27 Lonergan notes that in ten months of blogging, he had ‘just under 18,000 unique page views, which means that [his] posts are read on average by about 365 people. That would be slightly more than the average print run of most academic monographs’. Email to the author, 13 March 2014.

28 Lovink, Zero Comments, p. 4.

29 See Jill Walker, ‘Blogging from Inside the Ivory Tower’, in Uses of Blogs, ed. by Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 127–38 (p. 136).

30 Michelle MacArthur, ‘The Feminist Spectator as Blogger: Creating Critical Dialogue about Feminist Theatre on the Web’, Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches Théâtrales au Canada, 34.2 (2013), 162–86 (p. 170).

31 Dolan, Feminist Spectator, pp. 2, 1.

32 This is an honour for an American or US-based theatre critic that includes a $10,000 cash prize, awarded annually by Cornell University.

33 Lovink, Zero Comments, p. xxiv.

34 Exeunt <exeuntmagazine.com> [accessed 25 April 2014].

35 Critical Stages <criticalstages.org> [accessed 25 April 2014].