'Bring Back Exeunt' Fundraiser

When Exeunt announced it was taking a break in 2022, it was a blow to the theatre industry and audiences who wanted to find the latest weird, wild and experimental theatre. But now thanks to Holly Williams and her team - it's back as a Substack! We spoke to Holly about the newly refreshed publication and what we can expect from them as they go live again today (19th Nov).

Holly Williams is an author, journalist, critic, and editor. A former staff writer and arts editor for The Independent, as a freelance writer her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The TLS, Time Out, The Observer, The Times, and ELLE. Her novels What Time is Love? and The Start of Something are published by Orion.

Follow Holly and the Exeunt Team on socials:

Bluesky - @exeuntmagazine.bsky.social / @hollywilliams.bsky.social

Instagram & Threads – @exeunt_magazine / @holly.williams.writer

We all know we’re in a difficult time for arts journalism – and especially for writing about theatre, and especially-especially when it comes to writing about the weirder and wilder types of theatre, beyond your bankable classics, familiar adaptations, or big names.

I certainly have been feeling it as a freelance writer: it’s always been tough, but post-pandemic, with ad revenue vanishing, budgets shrinking, and space dwindling across print and digital media, it’s tougher than ever to find places to write about all the incredible stuff that’s happening in British theatre – or to have the luxury of really going in deep on a topic.

For those of us who just really bloody love theatre, it’s frustrating to accept this fact – but theatre is essentially in a niche interest within the attention economy. The clicks on a review of a show only on for a few weeks in one place will never rival those on content about the latest global Netflix sensation. When value is measured in this way, it’s no wonder that theatre coverage stutters and slides.

This is not to shame editors and journalists at mainstream newspapers, magazines and websites – they are often doing heroic work with ever-dwindling resources, over-stretched and underpaid themselves. But I do believe that audiences and readers who love the artform deserve more.

They deserve to get to nerd out. To be recommended shows and artists beyond the usual A-lister ‘hot tickets’. To see the sector celebrated, and also held to account. To read discussions and debates about what the purpose of theatre is and why we love it and who’s doing amazing work and what’s going wrong and what’s exciting and and and…

Which is why I wanted to bring back Exeunt. A brilliant theatre website founded in 2011 by Natasha Tripney and Daniel B Yates, it was a place I came to love reading and love writing for. It was a place where writers did get to stretch out – to go beyond rigid wordcounts to produce surprising, delightful, strident, well-informed, and funny pieces that really engaged with the work they were writing about.

When it shuttered in 2022, because of rising administrative costs, I missed it. And I knew a lot of other people did too.

So, something had to be done. And Exeunt is now coming back… as a Substack. We launch today, 19 November, and will be starting small, with two newsletters a week, straight to inboxes – or you can read on Substack or their app. One piece will be free and another will be for paid subscribers – an experiment in a new model of funding independent theatre criticism, where readers are invited to support us directly.

The last decade has proved that free journalism sadly simply isn’t sustainable, and even the biggest theatre-fan in the world shouldn’t be expected to write for free. If you want places like Exeunt to flourish, please do consider supporting our writers by signing up.

As its new editor, I do also feel the need to do a bit of expectation management here: in this new iteration, Exeunt won’t be able to offer the same sort of far-reaching reviews coverage it once did. But we can promise you in-depth essays, lively group discussions, longform criticism, investigations into under-reported topics, and essential round-ups and recommendations from an amazing team of writers.

And I hope it’ll be a friendly place for dialogue and debate with readers too – something that is surely needed now more than ever. Do come say hello.

Exeunt is launching on Substack 19th November 2024 here and you can support their fundraiser here.

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