|
|
|
|
Articles
|
|
|
Articles |
Theatre on the Web in 2000: Plays and TheatresSites for Plays As we saw last week, the dominance of the musical, at least in the West End, seems to be on the wane somewhat, and this is reflected in cyberspace. It would be nice, for us theatre fanatics, to think that it is accompanied by a rise in sites devoted to plays, but that hasn't been the case. There are more play sites online, yes, and they tend to fall into four distinct types. First are the sites produced by writers to publicise their own plays. Generally these list and give extracts from all of the writer's work. If any of the plays have been produced, details of the production, occasionally with photographs, are shown. Very similar to these, but not sites in their own right, are pages (or often just parts of pages) on sites for theatres and theatre companies, giving details of their productions, but these are generally advertising and they tend to be short-lived, often, but not always, consigned to the Archive at the end of the season. The third type also consists of single pages rather than full sites: these are usually to be found on actor/acress sites of the type which concentrate on the individual's work and deal with productions in which (s)he has been involved. Sometimes these are simple extracts from a programme with, possibly, a few photographs, but at times they are a fund of information, with cast lists and other details, photographs, press reviews, comment by the actor/actress and, possibly, others in the cast and/or the director, and, in some cases, a review by the Webmaster/mistress. A good example of this kind of coverage is a site which is not, in fact, devoted to an actror or actress but to a theatre, the unofficial Glasgow Citizens Theatre site. Finally we have those sites which are devoted to individual productions. These are generally official in that they are created by the production's management. They advertise the production, of course, but the best of them give a great deal of information about the play itself. On the whole, the quality of play sites has improved in the last year, but there are still too many managements (production companies and theatres) which see the Web purely as an advertising medium and don't recognise the fact that there are many - journalists, academics, ordinary theatre-goers - who use the Internet as a research tool and for whom these sites could be an invaluable resource. This approach may not sell tickets in the short run (although there is no reason why it can't be combined with advertising and ticket sales, which is what the best sites do) but, like all PR, it has a long term beneficial effect for the company concerned. Sites for Theatres Of all the different kinds of British theatre sites on the Web, those for theatres are the ones which have shown least improvement during the past year. And this certainly isn't because they were ahead of the field beforehand. Apart from a few notable exceptions, theatres generally seem to think that putting their print brochure online is all they have to do. It's certainly an Internet presence, but that is the best that can be said. Some do much better. The RNT has an excellent site with a tremendous range of informtion available. But it isn't a function of size: the Almeida has a first class site. There are still theatres which begin a site and then leave it halfway through: the Pleasance is just such a one, and what a missed opportunity that is! Many theatres are also very dilatory in updating their sites. The number of these seems to have grown less this year, but it is still all too common to find last season's programme online when you are a month into the current season. I suspect that the reason behind this is shortage of staff. If your marketing department consists of one person, then updating the site tends to be pushed to the bottom of the pile of jobs waiting to be done. Even the biggest theatres, which may send out press releases ecvery week, seem to put them online at best every month. The situation seems to be that they feel that they need a Website - probably because everyone else has one - but they haven't the resources of the belief in the site's usefulness to devote much attention to it. NEXT >> Companies; Summary Articles Indices: |
|
|