Maintaining a regular web presence….

But I’m pleased to note that I’ve just spotted that Andrew Haydon, regular contributor to Guardian blogs and a personal blogger too, on a site he calls Postcards from the Gods updated his status on his Facebook page yesterday to let us know that “At last, I’ve finally gotten round to writing something on my blog. It’s basically a long excuse note, but it does have a fair few links to other stuff I’ve been writing, seeing and doing. From here on in, it should get a whole lot more outward looking again. I’m all done with my navel now…” I hope this also means a return to updating Culture Wars, the theatre section of which he commissions and hasn’t had a new posting since a review for The Revenger’s Tragedy back in June. Andrew is one of the new wave of arts journalists who are making a productive home on the web - and the fact that I found out about his return to hopefully regular blogging via facebook speaks volumes about how it now works. (I, meanwhile, have let my own status updates there lapse - perhaps I need to resume!)

Culture Wars is not the only online resource to recently seem to hibernate. What has become of the previously-lively Encore Theatre Magazine, whose last posting was back in January? One of the problems, as well as the pleasures, of the web is that it is a fast-moving environment; and without constantly being refreshed and renewed, the audience is going to move on. Unlike a newspaper which acquires a brand loyalty, the web audience is more fickle - easier to reach, for sure, but harder to pin down. They’re not necessarily coming back daily, unless you give them something new to read all the time. (Many sites, of course, including this one allow you to sign up to RSS feeds so you can be notified of updates as they are posted).

But at other times bloggers may have perfectly good personal reasons for suspending their web presence. One of the best theatre blogs around used to be kept by playwright David Eldridge; but visiting its homepage now one is merely informed, “This blog is now closed”. When he came to talk to the class I led in July of American theatregoers visiting London theatre under the auspices of Berkeley University, I asked him why; and he told us that, working with Catherine Tate on the current revival of Under the Blue Sky, who is one of the most famous people in Britain who he said can’t fart without it making into the papers, the blog would have been too exposed a place to continue to keep up. Perhaps he can resume when it closes on September 20.

Keeping blogs, and the regularity of its updates, is entirely at the discretion of their creators. But it’s virtually compulsory nowadays for theatres, however large or small, to have a permanent and lively web presence, and preferably an online box office, too. It should not just be a shop window but a place you can actually shop, as well. I usually give full marks to the National Theatre’s website, which holds full production information and access to a box office inventory where you can personally select the exact seats you want from what is available.

But even the National is not infallible, apparently, when it comes to supply and demand: as John Morrison recently reported on his blog, trying to buy tickets for David Hare’s Gethsemane on the day that the tickets went on advance sale to members produced what he called “a nailbiting Psycho experience”. He writes, “The key point is that the play will be in the small Cottesloe Theatre (why?) and everyone knows it will sell out fast.” (This is a question I raised, too, here And then he goes on, “So after breakfast I log in to the NT website (an old slapper of a website — I know from bitter experience how she leads you on with a flirty smile and then collapses and heads for the bar when the going gets rough). Step by step the tension mounts as I go from page to page with an agonising wait each time. I manage to click on four of the few remaining tickets for a preview performance (thank you, Java!) and inch my way forward, like Harold Lloyd hanging on from the skyscraper by his fingernails, towards checkout and payment. It gets slower and slower, because everyone else in the chattering classes who wants to see Hare put the knife into New Labour’s fundraising scandals is trying to do the same. Would I like to add a donation? No thanks, not this time, I just want to pay before my 20 minutes expires, and there are only 14 minutes left! I click on COMPLETE PURCHASE and there’s another agonising wait. The screen goes back to my shopping basket but there’s no confirmation of my purchase. A few more clicks and I seem to be logged out. Rats to the National Theatre, I think. Someone else will have bought my tickets by now. I try to log back in and start again but it’s impossible.” (He finally succeeds by phone later in the day).

Meanwhile, Leicester’s new Curve is yet to open its actual doors, but has already opened its online one - and after not being invited to yesterday’s press conference where their first season was announced, I had to check it out online instead. Although I’ll allow that every new building inevitably suffers teething problems, it’s intriguing that they’ve extended this already to their website, whose pages are painfully slow to load at present. (There are, however, some very impressive panoramic views of the theatre under construction, both inside and out).

But if the web is now allowing us inside the walls of a theatre even before it is open, it is even better for alerting us to theatre that doesn’t have the luxury of its own permanent walls. For the Factory, a company who will be marking their first anniversary with a one-off midnight performance of their production of Hamlet at Shakespeare’s Globe this Saturday, the web is their home: they are otherwise entirely peripatetic, and announce where they will be appearing via a Facebook Group and e-mail updates. According to their website, “We secretly move about London and play in different places as much as possible. We play every Sunday and announce where and when the same week.” According to the press release they issued to announce the Globe performance, the company was set up by its artistic directors Tim Evans and Alex Hassell “to see if it was possible to produce a hit show with no money, no advertising, no theatre and no discernable touring budget”. The web has become its main PR tool; and it is blazing a trail for proving that a production can accumulate a following to even take it, finally, inside a theatre again.