Shouts and Murmurs - November 19, 2024
I, too, will no longer be posting on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Plus: some more stuff about theatre.
Hello, and welcome to Shouts And Murmurs, a weekly email for paid supporters of The Crush Bar, written by me, Fergus Morgan.
Every week, I round up the best theatre writing elsewhere - news, reviews, interviews, opinion pieces, long-reads - plus any other interesting or inspiring theatre stuff I find.
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Previously in The Crush Bar:
Yesterday, in a severe blow to Elon Musk, I left Twitter/X after fourteen years of sporadic posting and set up an account on BlueSky.
I have no statistics - and this could very easily be false consensus bias - but it does seem like a lot of theatre folk are doing similarly, or already have done. I was half expecting Theatre BlueSky to be a desert devoid of theatrical chat, but it isn’t. There are plenty of performing arts professionals on there already, and dozens more with every passing hour. Big venues and companies - the tentpoles on which the big-top of theatre social media sits - are sparse, but they are steadily arriving, too. The Old Vic, the Donmar Warehouse, the National Theatre of Scotland, and the Bush Theatre all have accounts. Yesterday, The Stage, my main employer, set one up, too. I have posted four times, and I am now proud to say I am followed by no fewer than 251 people.
My reasons for leaving Twitter/X are broadly the same as those you have no doubt already heard elsewhere ad nauseam. Ever since Musk took over, the user experience of Twitter/X has nosedived: I never received any real abuse myself, but I was seeing far too many random videos of foiled robberies and posts about cryptocurrency than I cared to, and far too few posts about Rob Icke’s latest radical reimagination of a Greek tragedy. And, while I do have some sympathy with the view that we should not cede vital online spaces to bots and bigots, I also think that doesn’t matter so much when that vital online space is objectively broken from an operational perspective. You wouldn’t hang around chatting in a town square that was collapsing all around you. BlueSky is not a desert but Twitter/X is certainly a wasteland. Also, I didn’t want to endorse an incompetent billionaire with objectionable politics, particularly one who childishly throttled links to vital, independent Substack newsletters about theatre.
It is a shame because, a decade ago, Twitter - no /X back then - was where I first encountered passionate, articulate debate about theatre as a cub critic. A generation of theatre journalists and practitioners - fostered by the Guardian’s theatre blog, Exeunt, and other erstwhile initiatives - collectively built an online space where shows were discussed in detail and the industry examined with expertise. That world is long gone, though. Frankly, it disappeared well before Musk took over. Whisper it, but another reason Theatre Twitter/X became so bleak is because it went into an uninteresting spiral of bad faith takes, virtue signalling and identity politics.
At the moment, most posts on BlueSky seem to be about BlueSky, but presumably that will change over time. Perhaps a world of robust, responsible discourse can be built anew both on BlueSky and here on Substack: serendipitously, Exeunt relaunched today as a Substack, a welcome addition to the world of newsletter-based theatre journalism. A thriving conversational culture is essential for theatre to flourish and I think the lack of one has been a contributing factor to the industry’s well-documented difficulties. I hope the recent exodus of theatre folk from Twitter/X to other platforms marks a resurgence of that culture. I hope there are some green shoots on BlueSky.
In other news: Timothy West died at 90; Nicola Walker and Stephen Mangan will star in a new Mike Bartlett play in February; a report reveals that the arts are incredibly middle-class and a hike in tuition fees will only make that worse; Ishy Din and Beth Flintoff join Mike Bartlett, Ryan Calais Cameron, Vinay Patel and Nina Segal as associate playwrights at the Royal Court; loads of people have condemned the axing of the National Theatre’s primary schools touring programme; the Almeida Theatre has launched a new career development scheme; the Arts Council of Wales wants more money; Jack Holden and Ed Stambollouian’s Kenrex will transfer to London next year.