About Us

Adam and Jasmine have been writing about theatre for Not Exactly Billington since 2012. Both students of English Literature and Drama, Adam started the blog in 2012 as a hobby to keep a record of the growing variety of theatre he was seeing. Jasmine joined a few years later, and the two now share writing responsibilities. Sometimes they take turns writing reviews, sometimes they collaborate. Below are some of their thoughts on why they write and what they hope to achieve with the blog:

 

Both Leicester born and bred, we have been championing the arts in Leicester, East Midlands and around the UK for over a decade. We love writing about theatre and have written reviews for a range of shows: from Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon, to Sondheim at the National Theatre; from new writing at the Royal Court, to musicals on Broadway; from productions made at Leicester’s Curve, Sheffield’s Crucible and Northampton’s Royal & Derngate, to shows touring the UK.

We aim for our approach to be thoughtful, creative, honest and insightful. We have a passion for the theatrical canon and like to place our reviews in their historical/performance context. We also aim for consistency with the quality of our reviews. There’s so much creativity, passion, talent, intelligence and pure graft that goes into every decision of what we see on stage. We hope to do justice by capturing those efforts in our writing.

We’re grateful to occasionally receive comp tickets from theatres around the UK in exchange for a review. Other than that, much of the theatre we review is done for our own enjoyment. Ultimately, we feel that a review’s purpose should be to capture the feeling of what it’s like to be in the audience. ‘Writing letters to posterity’, as Tynan put it. It’s surely an almost impossible task. But theatre criticism is a practice and with each review we hope to continue contributing to an exciting, eclectic and thriving blogging community.