The British Theatre Guide


The British Theatre Guide is a UK-centred website of theatre reviews, news reports, interviews and obituaries. It also reviews opera and dance, as well as books, audio recordings and DVDs.
It has an online archive with articles from 1997.

Background

The British Theatre Guide site was a re-establishment of an earlier website about British theatre. It was launched on 18 November 2001 by former drama teacher, Peter Lathan, who also writes plays and runs a small-scale professional theatre company and has been active in the field of on-line theatre databases since 1996. The editorship was taken over at the beginning of 2012 by David Chadderton, who previously had been in charge of the BTG's coverage since 2003 and is also a member of the Manchester Theatre Awards panel.
As of 2012, the British Theatre Guide has a UK-based team of 60 established theatre reviewers, plus overseas contributors, including correspondents from New York City and France.
The London editor is Philip Fisher who runs a small team of critics in the Greater London Area, including three members of The Critics' Circle.
By February 2012 The British Theatre Guide archive, with over 7,000 reviews plus news, interviews and other features and information, was receiving more than 140,000 page views each week. In addition its free weekly newsletter is emailed to around 3,000 subscribers worldwide.
Intute, a university-based service which finds, evaluates and catalogues internet resources for education and research, said:
"The site includes articles on all aspects of British theatre, indexed both by date and by subject. Subjects include, theatre history, Shakespeare, and actors and acting. There are also British theatre reviews from the UK and New York, book reviews, a news section, and a discussion forum. Other resources on this extensive site include a British Theatre Directors' Index, a British Actors' Index, a Directory of Theatres in Britain arranged town by town, a glossary of theatre terms, an amateur theatre index, playwrights' FAQs, and the text of some interviews of relevance to British theatre."