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Theatre on the Web in 2000Dateline: 7th January, 2001 Last week we looked at what was happening in theatre in the UK in 2000: this week we'll see what impression British Theatre was making on the Web. And a very interesting time it was. According to all the surveys done during the year, the number of people in the UK online more or less doubled during the year, following the pattern set in 1999. About a fifth of the population now has and uses internet access, and the growth continues. UK take-up and growth continues to outstrip that of any other European country. As you would expect, therefore, the number of sites related to theatre continues to grow, and - again as you would expect - the greatest number of sites are those devoted to actors and actresses, with actors' sites being in the majority. In fact, a quick check and associated guesstimate shows that two thirds of the sites in our Actors and Actresses Libraries are for actors and one third for actresses. Actor and Actress Sites There are basically three types of site devoted to actors and actresses: the official site (set up by the person concerned or, at least, based on information provided by the actor), the site which extolls the actor's career, technique and skills, and what is often called the "worship" or "shrine" site. The basic content is usually pretty similar - biography, career outline, pictures - but the way of treating the content differs. The first two are often very similar, except that, in the interests of appearing to be modest, official sites express considerably less admiration! The "worship/shrine" sites, however, show very clearly their hormonal origins. High in what I have called elsewhere the slobber/drool factor, they express a certain sexual longing. Those for actresses set up by men tend to be a little more honest than those for actors set up by women. They are reminiscent of nothing so much as magazines like Loaded: "X is a babe and, cor, I wouldn't mind giving her one!" As an aside, I came across an interesting piece of hypocrisy recently: the Webmaster of one of these sites primly announced "You will find no nude pictures of X on this site", but then proceeded to give the URLs of the sites where they could be found! For some reason there do tend to be more sites of the slobber/drool variety devoted to actors and created by women than there are devoted to actresses and created by men. Both, however, are now very much in a minority whereas two or three years ago they made up a considerable proportion of all actor/actress sites. Many of the best theatre resource sites on the Net, in fact, are fan sites for actors or actresses. An increasing number are intelligently written, full of information and often contain sensitive reviews of the actor's work, written by the Webmaster/mistress. For my taste, however, there are still too many which include reviews like "X appears in this film for 15 seconds and is the only good thing in it." However, as I said above, there is no doubt that the quality of actor/actress sites is improving all the time and more and more are useful resources for the serious student of theatre rather than embarrasments, as so many once were. Sites for Musicals There was a a time when, no matter where you looked on the Web, you would bump into a plethora of sites for musicals. The proportion is now much lower, and this is not only due to the increased number of sites in general, for fewer musicals sites are being created. A couple of years ago, the advent of a new Lloyd Webber musical, like The Beautiful Game for instance, would have brought out a rash of new sites devoted to the show. This doesn't happen any more. One could argue, of course, that the latest crop of musicals have not had the impact of shows like Cats, Les Mis or Phantom, and that is true, but it's not just that new sites are not being created in such numbers. In fact, quite a number of what used to be quite major sites have simply vanished from the face of the earth. You'll find that there are no longer the number of sites devoted to, for example, Cats, that there were a few years back. NEXT >> Plays; Theatres Articles Indices: |
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