On bringing back Exeunt
Enter, in pursuit of a bear...
Hello, and welcome to Exeunt.
For some of you, that’s welcome back. Welcome to our new home on Substack: a way to deliver in-depth, inventive, fierce and playful writing about theatre, straight to your inboxes.
Exeunt was founded as an online magazine in 2011 by Natasha Tripney and Daniel B Yates, and quickly established itself as an oasis for writers. Exeunt offered space to stretch out in, time to think deeper and write more freely about all aspects of theatre. And it became essential reading for theatre-lovers, in the UK and beyond – for both the reverence and irreverence with which it treated the artform.
I loved Exeunt, as a journalist and as a reader: where else could I review an interactive show with my video-game obsessed brother or attempt to sum up a play with a dodgy palindromic poem? Where else could I read about meta-theatricality as a feminist act; a scorching essay on the limits of satire; a lyrical mediation on a decade of Edinburgh fringes, or a critic arguing with their own gut reaction to a play? Where else published odes to pure theatrical joy and hilariously petty lists of theatrical pet peeves?
So when the website shuttered in 2022, I mourned the loss. Arts coverage in the media is shrinking everywhere, with fewer pieces and less space – losing somewhere free from those constraints was particularly gutting. A stunted critical discourse is bad news for theatremakers, bad news for audiences, and terrible news in terms of whose voice gets heard.
Eventually, I decided something should be done and… well, this is it. Consider this Substack a new green shoot for Exeunt – or a re-potting, perhaps, taking a cherished thing and planting it gently in fresh soil.
It’s a bit different here, and Exeunt as a newsletter will undoubtedly grow in new ways, new directions. But being frank, we’ll be starting small, for now: two newsletters a week, one free and one paid. In this space, we will obviously not be attempting to review every show in the country – but you can expect the same sort of in-depth essays, lively group debates, longform and boundary-pushing criticism, and essential investigations into under-reported issues within British theatre.
Exeunt can only flourish with your support. Subscribing costs just £5 a month – less than the cost of a drink in most theatres – and we currently have an introductory offer: sign up now, and it’ll cost just £4 a month for £44 for the whole of your first year. Or become a Founder Member and support us with a higher-tier subscription, or a one-off donation (there’s no upper limit!)
Arts journalism should not only be the preserve of the wealthy. All fees will go directly to payment for writers and editors.
Exeunt has always been about supporting and nurturing new and unheard voices, and we’d love to hear from writers who have something to say, or want to play with new ways of saying it. Send us your most exciting, urgent, angry, or whimsical ideas at: exeunt.inbox@gmail.com. Voices from under-resourced and under-represented backgrounds, and those outside London, are especially encouraged.
To kick things off, our first piece looks to the past as well as the future: brilliant previous editors, Natasha Tripney and Alice Saville, discuss the changing face of theatre criticism – and Exeunt – since 2011, and take stock of the current landscape…
I hope this will be an exciting next stage for Exeunt – please do join us.
Holly Williams
‘We were trying to produce something that reflected the fevered conversations you’d have in the pub after a show’
Natasha Tripney: The idea for Exeunt was hatched in a theatre bar, or more accurately, several theatre bars – and from a feeling that something was missing.
Before this point, there had been a vibrant theatre blogging community – back when blogging was a thing – full of people documenting their responses to theatre in ways in which weren’t possible in traditional reviews. Bloggers had the space to dig deep into a production. They were unhampered by word-counts (though they could also be just as clubby as their traditional media peers and while the scene wasn’t exclusively male, it certainly felt that way sometimes). The rise of the theatre blog had enough of an impact on the critical landscape to fuel numerous think-pieces framing this in an oppositional way: critics vs bloggers. For a while, when The Guardian was a bit more flush, it even had its own blog where it published some of those same voices, creating a hub for the kind of granular/nerdy conversations that bloggers enjoyed having – but eventually the money ran out, creating a hole which Exeunt eventually filled.
Exeunt didn’t just pop out of thin air, mind you. For a while I had been editing the theatre section of MusicOMH, a music website which is still going strong today. I amassed a small team of writers, including Daniel B Yates, who would become my co-conspirator in terms of getting Exeunt off the ground. At MusicOMH, we were always slightly hampered by the fact that it was first and foremost a music website with a slightly confusing name. It was clear the theatre coverage needed its own home. We began to discuss creating a separate platform, a space for experimentation and irreverence, a space where writers could play around and explore different forms, a publication that revelled in the creative potential of writing about bodies on stage, and, crucially, a publication that was fun to read.
The idea of it being a collective endeavor was also central and from the beginning. From quite early on, Exeunt felt like a community and that’s something I think – I hope – remained true.
Alice Saville: It definitely felt like a community when I joined in 2012 – an outspoken, nerdy, spiky, funny, friendly club of theatre fans, with an ursine logo (a reference to the famous Shakespeare stage direction, [Exit, pursued by a bear]) and new ways of writing about theatre. Like dialogues, an excellent podcast, and long features that ran into multiple pages and introduced me to words like ‘crepuscular’ and ‘diegetic’. It felt incredibly exciting, being able to share my love of theatre with strangers who became friends at red wine-fuelled press nights or gin-soaked Edinburgh fringe socials. It was a time when there were loads of theatre blogs and online publications (not least because writing theatre reviews was a way to get free tickets) but Exeunt felt different.
Instead of trying to produce a less satisfying imitation of the kind of criticism you’d find in newspapers, we were trying to produce something that reflected the kind of fevered conversations you’d have in the pub after the show: opinionated, often first person, in depth, passionate. Soon after I joined, Natasha made the decision to scrap star ratings, setting us apart from the more marketable responses by more traditional publications – and causing many a fringe producer to tear at their thinning hair.
Natasha Tripney: I think ‘fevered conversations you have in the pub after the show’ is exactly the kind of energy I was going for! As Alice points out, we did have star ratings for a period in the site’s infancy. Some people in theatre PR back then could be quite sniffy about online platforms and we felt that it was necessary in terms of establishing ourselves as a publication. We played with them on occasion – I remember feeling very pleased with myself having converted the stars into pentagrams for one review – but when the time came to redesign the site, we decided to bin them. They worked against the spirit of the site and I was never happy about having them. We faced some pushback on this front from PRs – and even from artists – but we wanted the writing to be the focus.
Alice Saville: This stubborn, singular approach was typical of Exeunt in so many ways – and I think that it’s something that earned us loyalty from our readers.
Natasha Tripney: Another central pillar of Exeunt’s identity as a platform was the dialogue format. Critics in conversation with one another. Critics in conversation with artists. The first of these was published in 2012, and was a piece about Three Kingdoms, the ambitious UK/German/Estonian co-production of a play by Simon Stephens directed by Sebastian Nübling. We would return to the model again and again, sharing our experiences of the latest Punchdrunk or peeling back the layers of Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play Emilia. Our New York offshoot, Exeunt NYC even published a dialogue on dialogue reviews.
Alice Saville: The dialogue continued online, especially on X/Twitter, where opinion pieces would get hundreds of reposts and comments, belying the myth that theatre is or was ever “niche”. At one point, my inbox was even besieged with hate mail from furious ballet fans after Anna Winter’s review of Mayerling described a noisily xenophobic fellow audience member as a “tweedy prick”.
Still, there was always the problem of how to make the site more than an incredibly all-consuming hobby for the people that ran it. In 2017, we launched a Friends Scheme – but although everywhere we went, people would say how important they felt Exeunt was, it was hard to convert that groundswell of support into actual sign ups.
Natasha Tripney: We also toyed with the idea of paywalling or creating some sort of members area, but I was always resistant to the idea, though admittedly without having a fully-formed plan for how the site would sustain itself beyond the trickle of advertising revenue (back when theatre companies had the budget for this).
Alice Saville: Discussion and debate about theatre is important! But funding it is so, so hard. Looking back to the beginnings of Exeunt, I feel this deep, tragic sense of irony. When we started, the professional theatre critics working for newspapers and magazines would write endless op eds about the “death of criticism”. Some saw bloggers (and they very much included us in that category) as an existential threat to their jobs, with writers like axed Sunday Telegraph critic Tim Walker reporting a “spotty, young, out of their comfort zones and clearly exhausted” horde of new self-described critics turning up at press nights, undermining a profession that was once only accessible to a select few.
But in a sense, criticism at that time had never been healthier, with professional critics, bloggers, and online publications creating a boisterous, plural, noisy debate around new work that hasn’t been seen before or since. Today there are far fewer paid full-time theatre critics in the UK then there were 10 years ago, and those who remain cover a shrinking beat of shows. But bloggers are not and were never to blame. Instead, the fate of theatre critics can’t be separated from the wider doldrums that journalism is in.
Newspapers and publications of every kind rushed online in the 2010s, making their work available for free with no business model – just an abstract faith that soaring readership numbers would translate into future profit. Overwhelmingly, they did not. And as newspapers’ print circulations fell, taking their main income source with them, arts coverage was one of the first bits to be cut, because of a perception that it was niche, that it didn't get clicks unless a shiny star casting or known property was involved.
Even more ironically, the same problems facing ‘professional’ critics bedeviled the indies, too. Blogging fell out of fashion, with many independent critics finding it hard to justify their exhausting (and expensive) hobby. And much-loved arts criticism publications including A Younger Theatre, LGBTQ+ Arts Review, Witness Performance and, of course, Exeunt tried in vain to find a sustainable model for funding what they were doing. Now, the critical conversation around theatre is at risk of going quiet, just when we need it the most. Brutal economic conditions and cuts to arts education mean that theatre needs more champions than ever. Especially the kind of experimental, fringe, leftfield performance that Exeunt has always got excited by…
We all need more of the nuance and ambivalence and conflict that good criticism provides
Natasha Tripney: Still, while it’s true we have lost a lot of platforms over the last few years, the same period has seen the rise of the newsletter, a reader-funded, subscriber-driven model of publication using platforms like Substack and Buttondown. These include Fergus Morgan’s The Crush Bar, Nancy Durrant’s The London Edit, Lauren Halverosen’s digest of US theatre, Nothing for the Group, Tracey Sinclair’s Notes from the Northeast, Chris McCormack’s Irish theatre review Feeling Good, Mark Ravenhill’s 101 Exercises for Playwrights (and my own European theatre newsletter Café Europa).
Neither click-driven nor subject to editorial pressure, they are spaces where writers (including several Exeunt alumni) can share local and niche knowledge, can champion lesser known work or go deep on a topic that otherwise wouldn’t receive very much coverage. It’s not a perfect model – I find it a little jarring when Slavoj Žižek asks if I would please consider becoming a paid subscriber – but it’s a way of directly connecting writers with readers, and increasingly feels like a community.
Alice Saville: That sense of community feels incredibly exciting to me, because it was always something that Exeunt stood for – that idea that instead of handing judgements down from upon high like a cruel Old Testament god, the critic was a human being, sitting across the table from artists and theatremakers. And another thing I find hopeful about Substack is the idea that we're moving towards a world where people recognise that if they want a more nuanced conversation, they need to feed and support it.
I came of age enthralled by the ideals of the free internet – the idea that information should be accessible to everyone, anytime, with no cost. I'm so pleased that Exeunt's website will remain online as a free archive documenting a decade of theatre and thinking around it. But 10 years on, I'm equally excited by the potential for Exeunt to grow into something that can nourish its writers, as much as its readers – and last longer term.
Critical thought is something that's massively needed right now, as AI nonsense floods the internet, politicians deal in ‘alternative facts’, and social media hype parts ways with reality. We all need more of the nuance and ambivalence and conflict that good criticism provides. And I hope that Exeunt will be a place where people come for the kind of conversations that keep theatre lively, passionate and relevant as the world keeps on turning.
loving the bear illustrations! - Alice's handiwork I presume?
The bear enters!