"There will be loads of fun, creative, inventive stuff from lots of really brilliant, passionate writers."
Holly Williams, the new editor of Exeunt Magazine, on the much-missed publication's arrival on Substack, and three shows to see next week. Plus: a discount on paid subscriptions to The Crush Bar.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre written by Fergus Morgan.
This is the free, Friday issue, which usually contains a Q&A with an exciting theatremaker or an essay on a theatre-related topic. This week, there is a chat with Holly Williams about the return of Exeunt here on Substack. After that, there are your three show recommendations.
In case you missed it, here is Tuesday’s issue of Shouts And Murmurs, which is a weekly round-up of the most insightful writing about theatre elsewhere for paid supporters of this newsletter.
Become a paid supporter of The Crush Bar - and help support theatre journalism - for 20% less.
Usually, becoming a paid supporter of The Crush Bar costs £5/month or £50/year. To celebrate the arrival of Exeunt on Substack, though, and because it is the time of year for deals, I am reducing that to £4/month or £40/year until the end of November.
Both Exeunt and Natasha Tripney’s Café Europa are operating similar discounts right now. If you want to support the revival of independent theatre journalism on Substack, please consider subscribing to The Crush Bar, Exeunt, or Café Europa - or even all three at once.
There are a couple more things you can do to support this newsletter: you can share it with anyone you think might enjoy it and encourage them to subscribe, and you can use it for promotional purposes. There is more info about that here. Right, that’s enough waffle from me.
Exeunt is back, it is on Substack, and it has a new editor: Holly Williams.
Exeunt Magazine posted something for the first time in over two years this week. The online publication fell silent in early 2022 after eleven years of operation, exhausted by the pandemic and unable to find a sustainable model that would allow its inimitable brand of passionate, imaginative, entertaining theatre journalism to thrive. Its absence was keenly felt: nowhere else covered the theatre industry quite like Exeunt.
Now, though, Exeunt has found a new home here on Substack, joining a number of other newsletters dedicated at least partly to theatre, including Natasha Tripney’s Café Europa, Lauren Halvorsen’s Nothing For The Group, Tracey Sinclair’s Notes From The North East, Nancy Durrant’s The London Culture Edit, Chris McCormack’s Feeling Good, and this one you are currently reading. Coupled with the theatre industry’s ongoing exodus from Twitter/X to BlueSky, Exeunt’s arrival amid this growing culture suggests that a resurgence in an invigorating online discourse around theatre - something that has not existed for several years - might be on the cards.
Below, Exeunt’s new editor - the journalist and author Holly Williams - discusses the publication, how it will work, and what its return might mean for theatre. First, though, make sure you subscribe to Exeunt here to get it straight in your inbox.
For anyone that doesn’t know, can you explain what Exeunt is?
Exeunt was a website that was founded by Natasha Tripney and Daniel B Yates in 2011 as a home for writing about theatre that was a bit more creative, a bit freer, a bit more expansive than the limited, short reviews you usually get in newspapers and magazines. Sometimes it was serious. Sometimes it was extremely silly.
I used to read it and write for it. I really enjoyed it. I think a lot of people really loved it as a space for writing about theatre that was different and esoteric.
I once wrote a review of James Graham’s Quiz in the style of a quiz. Natasha published an annual poem made up of snippets of show descriptions from the Edinburgh Fringe programme. Exeunt was full of stuff like that.
Ross Sutherland once had a show that was written as a palindrome, so I tried to make my review a palindrome, too. It really broke my head, though. I only managed a paragraph. I don’t think anywhere else would have indulged me like that.
What happened to Exeunt?
Natasha ran it for a while. Alice Saville took over as editor with Rosemary Waugh in 2016. Then Exeunt kind of stopped functioning in 2022. Alice wanted to pay writers, but it is hard to fund stuff like Exeunt. The website was ancient by then, as well, and it was going to cost quite a lot of money just to get it back up and running.
Now it’s back, though, and it is here on Substack. How did that happen?
I write novels as well as journalism. Everyone was always telling me I should have a Substack, so the idea was in my mind. Book Substack is oversubscribed, though. There are a lot of Substacks about books. There isn’t much stuff about theatre, though. There is your one, The Crush Bar. There is Natasha’s Café Europa about European theatre. There are a few others, but those were the ones I knew about.
So, I thought there was a slot for another Substack about theatre. I didn’t want it to just be me, though. I wanted it to feature a range of writers. I had been messaging Alice about Exeunt, and bringing it back as a Substack just seemed to make sense.
How will Exeunt work on Substack?
We are going to keep the website as it is as an archive. On Substack, though, things are going to be a bit different. There will be two emails a week to start with, on Tuesdays and Fridays. The main difference will be with reviews. Exeunt had ended up reviewing really widely across most of the country and it just wasn’t sustainable. It was a huge amount of admin and there wasn’t enough money to pay well.
On Substack, there will still be reviews, but they will be long-form, sometimes covering multiple shows, sometimes doing something unusual with the format. Alongside that, there will be all the stuff people loved about Exeunt. There will be discussions and deep dives and interviews and investigations. There will be loads of fun, creative, inventive stuff from lots of really brilliant, passionate writers.
Our first piece is by Tim Bano and it is about Rob Icke and his adaptations of classics. We have a piece coming up debating the use of cameras on stage. Alice and Natasha are involved. Rosemary is writing something. Hannah Greenstreet is writing something. Lots of people that used to write for Exeunt want to be involved again. Hopefully it will evolve as a space for new writers to cut their teeth, too.
What about the money side of things? How will Exeunt be sustainable on Substack? Are you going to take all my paid subscribers?
One newsletter a week will be free. One newsletter a week will be for paid subscribers. At the moment, we are running an introductory offer. Sign up as a paid subscriber now, and it will cost £4 per month or £44 for a whole year, which is less than a drink in most theatres. You can also support us with a higher-tier subscription, if you want to, or you can make a one-off donation.
Of course, we want Exeunt to be as accessible to as many people as possible, but we also want to pay the people that write for it. Almost every free media model over the last decade relies on advertising, and that is really problematic, particularly for publications that cover something relatively niche, like theatre. Hopefully, enough people are willing to pay that we can keep Exeunt going on Substack. I’m hopeful. It is easier to operate that model on Substack, where everything is streamlined. There is more of a culture of paying for writing on Substack, too. And obviously, everybody should become paid subscribers to both The Crush Bar and Exeunt.
We both started writing about theatre at a time when the online conversation about it – on Exeunt and on Twitter – was really lively. That has totally disappeared now.
I agree. That conversation was a bit spiky, but it was generally friendly and lovely, and it was generative, too. Then it slowly got dragged down by Twitter’s bad vibes. Then Twitter turned really awful under Musk. Restarting that conversation is definitely one of the reasons for bringing Exeunt back, and bringing it back on Substack. Hopefully, it can help build another friendly, supportive, nerdy community space for people that are passionate about theatre. I hope the comments section under articles will be lively. I hope that other Substacks about theatre – your one, Natasha’s one, other ones, new ones – can interact, too.
I hope so, too. I think that conversation is important to the health of the industry, and I think the spaces for it have drastically shrunk in recent years. That has an effect on us, too. The world of freelance arts journalism is fairly bleak right now.
I’ve been a freelance journalist for eight years, and this is as bad as it has ever been, apart from those three months in 2020. That is one of the personal reasons for restarting Exeunt. I don’t want to slag any editors at newspapers or magazines off as they are all doing three people’s jobs with very small budgets, but I was getting very frustrated at putting pitches together, sending them off, and hearing nothing in return. The rates are the same as when I started, too, and they were bad then.
Even when you do get work, that work has to fit within a certain format or be pegged to an event. There is no room at all for something more unusual or esoteric. You can’t just say: ‘Look, I really fucking love this one show. Please give me 1000 words to tell you why it is brilliant.’ Exeunt would let you do that. And it will again.
Exeunt Magazine is published on Substack on Tuesdays and Fridays. You can subscribe here.
Three shows to see next week
Cutting The Tightrope - Arcola Theatre, until December 7
In February, Arts Council England provoked widespread anger when it warned cultural organisations not to make “overtly political or activist” statements. The Arcola Theatre programmed Cutting The Tightrope: The Divorce Of Politics From Art in response: a collection of short plays, written in a month and rehearsed in a fortnight, addressing both censorship and contemporary geo-politics, particularly the ongoing atrocities in Gaza. Cutting The Tightrope originally ran in May, when The Guardian’s Brian Logan called it “an opinionated, entertaining and urgent evening that doesn’t just grapple with lofty questions about art and politics, but that asks what art can do, right now, in the face of the Gaza emergency.” Now, the plays are back at the Arcola Theatre for a fortnight, with work from Sonali Bhattacharyya, Ed Edwards, Nina Segal, Hassan Abdulrazzak, and others. You can get tickets via the button below,
WEER - Soho Theatre, until November 30
American clown Natalie Palamides won the prestigious Best Newcomer Comedy Award at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe with her debut hour Laid, then returned in 2018 with her acclaimed dissection of toxic masculinity Nate. This August, she was at the Traverse Theatre with time-hopping rom-com WEER, in which she plays both the man and the woman in a fractious relationship, her body and costume divided down the middle to enable her to rapidly switch between both characters. TimeOut’s Andrzej Lukowski called it “another virtuoso piece of batshittery” in his four-star review. Earlier this month, WEER transferred to Soho Theatre, where it is still running until the end of the month. You can get tickets via the button below.
Treasure Island - Edinburgh Lyceum, until December 21
The Edinburgh Lyceum’s Christmas show this year is a new, gender-swapped adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, written by Orkney-based playwright Duncan McLean and directed by Lyceum regular Wils Wilson, whose previous credits include celebrated stagings of David Greig’s The Strange Undoing Of Prudencia Hart and Jo Clifford’s version of Life Is A Dream. Jade Chan and Amy Conachan star as Jim and Lean Jean Silver. You can get tickets via the button below.
Episode four of my podcast A History Of Scottish Drama In Six Plays was released on Monday. It is all about the generation of playwrights that emerged in Scotland in the 1980s, focusing on the Traverse’s summer season of 1985, when three playwrights - Peter Arnott, Chris Hannan and Jo Clifford - all burst onto the scene simultaneously.
That’s all for this issue
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all, really - just reply to this newsletter or email me at fergusmorgan@hotmail.co.uk. Or you can find me on Twitter/X, where I am @FergusMorgan.
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Fergus