by Saoirse Anton

I know what you’re thinking – Hang on, didn’t I just read a column from Saoirse a couple of weeks ago, it can’t have been a month already? You’re right. From now on you get the delight of my columnised company twice a month! Welcome to our new series of columns – Theatre Stories. Your port of call for news, interviews and interesting stories from on and off stage.

This may be a new column series, but writing about theatre is nothing new, and I take delight in being part of a long line of theatre journalists and critics before me. So to kick off our Theatre Stories, buckle in for a very brief whistle-stop tour of theatre writing through the ages!

And I really do mean ages – we begin the story in Ancient Greece and Rome with Aristotle and Horace. Though newspapers and journalism as we know it was still a distant dot on the horizon, both of these writers laid down the foundations of theatre criticism as we know it by laying down their guidelines for the productions of theatre in their works The Poetics and Ars Poetica. Their ideas would carry through centuries, influencing the development of what we now know as theatre criticism from the Medieval and Renaissance critics measuring plays against these preordained classical rules, to the eighteenth century critics writing in The Prompter in London and The Tickler in Dublin (some of the first ever dedicated theatre journals), and even as far as current theatre bloggers and podcasters, but a lot has changed too. Megan Vaughan’s now legendary review of Teh Internet is a Serious Business, which she wrote entirely in emojis formatted as a Whatsapp conversation, is a far cry from William Cook’s rigid approach in his 1775 book The Elements of Dramatic Criticism, where he wrote that his intention in reviewing was “to be foremost in recovering the theatre from […] usurpers, and restoring it to that respectable character it originally possessed – a public school of virtue and manners.”

Theatre writing has never been a fixed form; The multi-media critic of today may be almost unrecognisable to the Enlightenment critic, but there can be no doubt that it is surviving and driving the form forwards. It may be written in emojiis, wrangled into haikus, use video, podcasts or micro-blogs, or take a new form we haven’t even imagined yet. Whatever shape its evolution takes, theatre writing has a bright, unpredictable, and exiting future, and we’re excited to add a new column to that mix.

Over the coming months I’ll be bringing you musings on the latest news in Irish theatre, interesting stories from the vaults of history, and conversations with makers, movers and shakers in the Irish theatre world.

And what else? If you have a story that you think should be told in this column, get in touch! As Juliet Stevenson said, “theatre can be the place where we come together, reaching with and through stories, to who we are and to who we can be.”