Theatre Blogging: The Emergence of a Critical Culture by Megan Vaughan (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Theatre Blogging: The Emergence of a Critical Culture by Megan Vaughan
• Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.

THEATRE BLOGGING: THE EMERGENCE OF A CRITICAL CULTURE. By Megan Vaughan. London: Methuen Drama, 2020; pp. 280.

Hiya. I'm Kevin. Thanks for reading this review. I figured if I was gonna review a book on theatre blogging that reproduced a bunch of theatre blogposts, I might as well approach it as its own blog post. So there's gonna be some stream of consciousness, some digressions, and less-than-academic-butreal-as-shit spellings and language, so buckle up!

In sitting down to read the book for this review, I had in mind a recent TV commercial mocking older generations for "printing out the internet." Is that what this book would be? Just printing out the internet? (Spoiler alert: nope, it's not. I was wrong—it's so much more). In fact, some of the pieces in the book are no longer available online, so you kinda gotta read the book to see 'em.

Author/editor/curator Megan Vaughan argues that the pieces in the book are "'outsider' criticism" of theatre production, offering alternatives to the failing and fading "mainstream" media theatre criticism (9-10). (Point of order: I agree that mainstream media theatre criticism has dropped in quantity and quality—when I moved to Los Angeles over two decades ago, you could count on the Los Angeles Times and independent weeklies to review dozens of local productions every week. The weeklies are now gone, and we're lucky if the Times does three productions per week.) Vaughan is a blogger herself, having published a London theatre blog, Synonyms for Churlish (synonymsforchurlish.tumblr.com), from 2008 to 2016. Vaughan argues, "The theatre blogosphere has made a more significant and far-reaching contribution to theatre—its practices as well as its profile—than anything else in the twenty-first century" (3). Yes, a rather huge claim, one that says traditional theatre reviews in mainstream media are their own fossilized, gate-keeping institution set within very traditional (read: conservative) understandings and definitions of what theatre is and what good theatre is. Blogging is inclusive, community-based, and doesn't require a privileged, connected background to practice (although, as Vaughan admits [and points for honesty here], many bloggers do come from privileged racial and economic backgrounds). I'll leave it to the individual to decide if Vaughan is correct in asserting the primacy of blogging's significance (which, after all, is also what all theatre scholars do—"What I do is important and significant!" we cry), and like theatre scholarship, how much of it is a conversation within a small, self-selecting community. [End Page 413]

Theatre Blogging is divided into two parts. Part 1 offers a brief history and series of case studies of theatre blogging and its impact on audiences, artists, and the reception of production. Part 2 offers fifty-nine reprinted blog posts from a variety of bloggers arranged into six categories: "Theatremaking and Authorship," "Anger and Dissent," "Reviews and Reviewing," "Representation and Visibility," and two final categories that explore controversial productions, "On My Name Is Rachel Corrie" and "On Three Kingdoms."

Given Vaughan's own background and interests, the volume focuses primarily and predominantly on blogging in the United Kingdom, with some discussion of the United States context as well. Vaughan's history (and historiography) of theatre blogging is nuanced and credible. She faces the challenge of reflecting on the past fifteen years of blogging and attempting to contextualize controversies and discussions, discovering which were tempests-inteapots—over almost as soon as they began, but seemingly significant at the time—and which have had ongoing impacts. She's realistic as well about the early and initial promise of blogging as an alternative to mainstream criticism, but also about the actual practice and how much (or little) influence it had, not to mention how much blogging can reinforce as much as dismantle hierarchies of power. In the case of some major blogs, Vaughan argues that writers didn't seek to dismantle gatekeeping, but rather to assert themselves as the new gatekeepers.

The third chapter of part 1 stands out from the...