Critics can no longer take guests to NT press nights

May 21, 2016 8:25:41 GMT @theatremonkey said:

If you give "anyone with a blog" free tickets, it's just another version of an "under 25s access scheme." Limit it to a few influential bloggers, I can see the point, but please don't tell me that anyone with Wordpress is automatically going to be any good or ever be any good as someone who really captures public attention sufficient to justify the free ticket / marketing gain ratio a good reviewer should for a theatre.

I obviously don’t think that anyone with an Ethernet cable deserves a free ticket, or that starting a blog and demanding free tickets inherently means you’ll become the new Jacques Derrida, and I do think a form of discrimination has to occur – I just hope it tends towards the looser end, and encourages a number of people. If these comps are given to any Tom Dick or Harry with a tumbler then that delegitimizes them, but similarly if they’re only kept back to people who started blogging when it was a novelty and now are established, that delegitimizes them too.

Only giving blogging tickets to blogging bigwigs actually pushes blogging backwards, suggesting the future of blogging's less varied than its past, and that there is a bar over which you need to jump (Readers? Reviews written? Shows seen?) before you’ve ‘made it’. Obviously giving blogging tickets to blogging bozos who are just looking for a cheap night out pushes blogging backwards, because there has to be a form of quality control.  Giving blogging tickets to influential bloggers is hopefully a balance of old hats and new voices: what makes an critic influential now and what will make a critic influential in the future is experience, and giving half-decent bloggers now the experience of broadening themselves and developing their voice and influence is better than blocking them off because they've not got the influence they can only get by being seeing the theatre they're not allowed to see until they've got the influence they can't get without being influential in the first place.  Theatre criticism needs to broaden - as of now, blogging's still too cliquey, there absolutely is a 'team' of central figures, there's this awful internet group-think about how everything Ivo van Hove and Robert Icke to is genius and everything David Hare or Alan Ayckbourn do is middle class wank - and broadening the amount of emerging voices does just the trick to oppose this cul-de-sac.  Only giving them to established writers is simply staying in this cul-de-sac.

Besides, the difference between ‘emerging bloggers’ and ‘folk who like theatre and talk about themselves on the internet too much’ is fairly clear – there will be people truly using the freedom of self-publishing to try and push analysis further than a 700-word press-night write-up can offer, or doing interesting things with the medium, or focusing their attentions on becoming an expert in a niche. Those ‘emerging bloggers’ may not be influential, they may not be established, they may not even be that good yet, but if they’ve got a voice that looks like it might develop into something special, the teeny compensation of one ticket is good. And if they don’t grow into critics, no harm is done by the NT in giving them the chance to fail amidst giving better critics the chance to succeed.  So I absolutely think there should be a limit, I absolutely think there need to be criteria to be met, I absolutely think quality control is essential, I just think they ought to be lax, they ought to be positive and they ought to be beneficial to the critics who will grow into great critics. I don’t know how you’d limit this (I’d be terrible at it – for all that I’m being positive now, most professional critics get on my wick these days), but someone’s job should be like a football talent scout – to read all the sh*t banging about on the internet, to struggle through the obvious comments or insipid prose of too many young writers, to find the people with some solid knowledge of and passion for theatre, and give them this meagre compensation of £20 to help set them on their way.

I still expect the average blogger to have their 9 to 5, to scrape the time, the travel, the research, the writing experience themselves.  If they really care about theatre then, like you, like me, like most of us on here, they’ll give it their all financially and time-wise anyway – a £20 freebie doesn’t make or break anyone. But what this does (well, I’m overstating, but if this does set a precedent, what that precedent does) is legitimize blogging, and in a very minor way democratise it. Much like you or I, any young theatre lover absolutely has to fund it themselves, to live their own lives a propos of this, to put in all the legwork for love and love alone. But the teeniest compensation of £20 back is deserved, and the more good voices banging about these days who can be supported into becoming great ones – that’s got to be a good thing in my books.

Of course, if they really cared about the theatre, they'd have regular "Theatreforum Only Nights", but that's another fight for another day.

May 21, 2016 8:25:41 GMT @theatremonkey said:

Conversely, people like myself DID have to pay to build up our own knowledge - as would all the "official reviewers" we know today. If you have the dedication at a young age to do as I know I did - work up to 5 jobs at a time outside school - to pay for my habit, I'd argue the end result is the one we'd want. Actually dedicated and hardened people who know what they are talking about.

Well hey, that’s something I’m sure everyone on here understands. When I was a student, I was going to say my lowest point was that week I tried to survive on a seventh of a packet of value biscuits for dinner per day so as to fund theatre, but then there were days I just wouldn’t eat. I turned down dates because between financing sex or Sophocles I chose Sophocles. Just yesterday I went up to the local uni and had my head scanned for science for a mere £20 just so I could fund another trip – and I wish I could say that was the first time I’d funded a theatre trip by letting a stranger inside me for £20.