British Theatre Guide Blog

The fact that there has been complaint from existing Edinburgh theatres about the proposal to make the Assembly Rooms a year-round venue for professional productions (see our news story) has excited quite a debate in Scottish (and particularly Edinburgh) theatre circles.  The general consensus seems to be one which has resonances throughout the UK, that what is needed is not another large- or even mid-scale receiving house but small spaces (such as the Garage Theatre which the city council closed down) which can be used by emerging companies to experiment with new writing or new approaches.

Glasgow, we are told, has such places, and of course there are a lot in London too, but Edinburgh is not alone in lacking them.  Indeed there are very few suitable spaces throughout the UK and those which do exist often struggle daily to survive and depend upon the hard work, commitment and often money of dedicated individuals and groups.  Funding - either from under-pressure Arts Council or local authority sources - is hard to come by.

Yet a healthy theatre scene needs a firm foundation of experiment and innovation and much of this comes from small companies which are pushing the boundaries, whose work will not fill even 200-seater venues, who have to take the risk of using often totally unsuitable non-theatre spaces

Clearly funding such spaces is not attractive to big companies - they want maximum advertising exposure for their money - and funding organisations and local authorities have lots of demands on what they have available, so what chance does small-scale theatre have? 

Not a lot, actually, unless the companies do it themselves.  Here’s a suggestion: a group of companies get together and, together, approach a central pub which has a spare room of the right size.  They pool their resources and approach the pub’s management to ask them to make the room available free of charge, pointing out that this will attract new customers into the pub who will spend money on drink, in just the same way as a lot of pubs offer their “function room” free.  They approach the local Arts Council office to fund (or part-fund, if they have some cash or can get small-scale funding from local - possibly even in the same street - businesses) a basic conversion - some blacks and  a simple sound and lighting system - and they then collaborate to programme the space.  Perhaps the companies may need to pay a percentage of their box office take for the mainenance of the equipment/ insurance and so on.

Worth thinking about?  I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’s tried this, who can point out the pitfalls and would be willing to share their experiences.

How quickly things change!

When the prototype BTG began back in April 1997 as British Theatre at The Mining Company (long story: the BTG as it is now actually made its appearance in November 2001), the big thing was links - links, links and more links.  That’s what the company wanted, because that was what people wanted.

Those were the days when we talked about “surfing the Net”, and that’s what people did: went to a site, had a quick look, then hunted out that site’s list of links and followed one that looked interesting.  They “surfed” from site to site.  That’s what The Mining Company demanded of those of us who ran their sites, to list as many sites on our topic as we could find, plus comments so that our surfers would know what to expect when they got there.  By the end of 1997, the British Theatre site consisted of a few pages of general comment on theatre in the UK and page after page of links - over 2,000 of them (liks, that is, not pages!).

I suppose it was the excitement of this new medium, that one could view, in the comfort of your own home, sites based in countries throughout the world.  You want to know about a famous actor?  Ken Branagh was very big then and the MC British Theatre site listed a dozen or more, and people surfed from one to another, only to find that most had much the same information (and much the same photos).

How things have changed!  Not only has the Net grown up, but its users have too, and what they look for nowadays is reliable sources of information, and when they find one, they tend to stick with it.

 Even in 2001 our most viewed pages were what we called - a hangover from the Mining Company, this - our Links Libraries.  Now they are among the least visited pages and Reviews and News pages vie with each other for the top slot. 

 I have to say that I am delighted at the change.  It used to be very depressing (nay, boring!), going from site to site on the same topic only to find the same information expressed in slightly different ways.  At one point early on I got my wrist slapped because I started running news pages: “British theatre surfers,” they told me from the company office in West 42nd Street, New York, “don’t want news: they want links.”

Perhaps, I replied, they are looking for links to theatre news. Aha! bulb lights up!  OK, I could go ahead with the news pages.

I’m not claiming any special brilliance for “discovering” this, because all I was suggesting was what I wanted when I was surfing on my own accord and not for the company.  This was the time when we referred to the Net as the “information superhighway”, the operative word being “information”.

The other major change, at least as far as theatre sites are concerned, is the increase in reliable sources of information about actors, theatre companies and theatres, especially about actors.  In the early days I used to talk about the “slobber drool factor”, the high incidence of sites devoted to actors (and actresses) which were motivated by love (or lust) on the part of the site authors.  Look at actors’ sites now: those which are not put online by the actors themselves as part of their marketing strategy deal in hard information.  Their authors have discovered that waxing lyrical over their subjects’ beauty, attractiveness, sexiness even, does not tempt anyone other than a few poor souls similarly driven by oestrogen or testosterone!

The Web, ladies and gentlemen, has grown up!