Now we are eight
The BTG is now eight years old. It was on 17th November 2001 that it first went live on the Web. At that time it was genuinely a one-man band - there was just me - and in the first full week we had just over 1,000 page views.
Philip Fisher joined us very soon afterwards and so began the growth which has led to the present situation where we have over 40,000 unique visits and 100,000 page views a week and 44 regular contributors, excluding Philip and myself, together with a number of occasional contributors.
We have reviewers throughout England, in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, in New York and in Europe. We have specialist dance and opera reviewers and amongst our regular contributors are members of the Critics’ Circle, trained journalists, actors, playwrights and directors. Five are theatre directors, three are actors, two theatre-related academics, eleven trained journalists (most of whom specialise in theatre), one performed playwright (although two of the directors and one actor are also performed playwrights), four general theatre-related writers (one also a translator), and five working in other theatre jobs, including one musical director.
There are, at the time of writing, over 12,800 pages online, almost half of which are reviews from theatres throughout the country, the Edinburgh Fringe, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Latitude Festival, as well as from New York, Paris, Avignon, Brussels, Bayreuth and Verona, and they cover plays, musicals, physical theatre, circus, opera, ballet and contemporary dance.
However this is site’s second incarnation. It actually began in 1997 as the Mining Company British Theatre site - odd name, I know, but it was so called because we ”mined” the Web to find the best sites in our spubject area - which later became British Theatre at About.com. When Primedia Inc took over About.com in 2001 they closed all the sites which did not relate to their print publications in the US and so some 300 of us were “let go” in September of that year.
So we could, in some sense, be said to be almost a teenager!