Why I am not doing theatre reviews
Although I’ve not actually done much design work while here in London, I’ve certainly seen a lot of shows. It’s not been uncommon to see three or more a week, thanks to places like TKTS, day seats, and frequent deals from the individual theatres. The National Theatre does a whole pile of £10 seats to all their shows, and the Royal Court does £10 Mondays. If you can stand standing, you can get into almost anything at the opera house, and there’s a few other secret deals out there.
Thanks to a rather random connection at work, and the networking marvel that is twitter, I’ve ended up connected to and fairly frequently seeing shows with various bits of an entire community of bloggers who write up everything they see, frequently beating the press to the punch – given that they pay for tickets and aren’t getting paid, the online writers don’t feel quite so subject to the gentleman’s agreement the traditional media has about not reviewing a show before press night. Wearing my SEO hat I’ve been actively helping one of them make her site perform better in Google as well. But, apart from a couple guest posts under a not-too-secret alias, I’ve never given in to the reviewer bug myself.
In part, I don’t want the pressure. It would be pressure from myself, but still – I’m bad enough these days about keeping up on this or other places which might require thought beyond 140 characters, and if I start to formally review stuff I can see where I’ll be wrangling a lot with waning desire to write and some sense of obligation that I should. So best to not set the expectation, right?
Another part is this site itself. While I’ve not pushed to do many shows here, it’s still a portfolio and a resume and when I do sell myself I’m going to point people here – and while it may reflect well that I’m out and watching and know what’s going on, I also want to avoid being in a position where I’ve publicly trashed the work of someone I want to work with. And I’m not above trashing something that doesn’t work.
What I may consider is simply aggregating the reviews of others, though that’s kind of the point of upthewestend.com so I’d need to put some spin of my own on it. And of course there’s lots more in terms of art and events and movies that I see which would all be fair game to post up here. If I got motivated. *grin*