1 See, for example, Henry Mance, ‘Britain Has Had Enough of Experts, Says Gove’, Financial Times, 3 June 2016, at www.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d108c, accessed 2 September 2017.

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5 Not all research into theatre audiences has grown directly out of the ‘audience studies’ tradition. Some theatre audience researchers are embedded in alternative traditions of arts management, cultural policy, marketing or ethnography; the comments on methodological and analytical approaches in this article therefore do not presume to speak for everyone. Instead, the intention is to provide a critical background for understanding the cultural studies trajectory of audience research that Helen Freshwater describes as ‘characterised by a rejection of the notion of “the audience” as a singular or homogenous entity, a detailed interrogation of diverse and sometimes unexpected responses, and an ethnographic engagement with the range of cultural conditions which inform an individual's viewing position’. Freshwater, Helen, Theatre & Audience (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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7 For more on the tension between intrinsic and instrumental models of value see the literature review provided by Holden, John, Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy: Why Culture Needs a Democratic Mandate (London: Demos, 2006), pp. 1–67.Google Scholar

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9 Fun Palaces, ‘About’, at www.funpalaces.co.uk/about, accessed 7 September 2017.

10 For valuable examples of ‘amateur’ and ‘community’ culture see, for example, Jeffers, Alison and Moriarty, Gerri, eds., Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).Google Scholar

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15 Reinelt, Janelle, ‘What UK Spectators Know: Understanding How We Come to Value Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 66, 3 (2014), pp. 337–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Freshwater, Theatre & Audience, p. 27.

16 Reinelt, ‘What UK Spectators Know’, p. 338.

17 Ibid., p. 338. See also, for example, Barker, Martin and Mathijs, Ernest, ‘Researching World Audiences: The Experience of a Complex Methodology’, Participations, 9, 2 (2012), pp. 664–89.Google Scholar

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31 Freshwater, Theatre & Audience, p. 3.

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34 Johanson, Katya and Glow, Hilary, ‘A Virtuous Circle’, Participations 12, 1 (2015), pp. 254–70Google Scholar. See, for example, David Osa Amadasun's ‘Black People Don't Go to Galleries’, Media Diversified, at www.mediadiversified.org/2013/10/21/black-people-dont-go-to-galleries-the-reproduction-of-taste-and-cultural-value, accessed 7 September 2017, also cited in Johanson and Glow's article, which demonstrates the restrictive power of arts institutions for many people of colour.

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36 Alston, Adam, Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 26. Emphasis in original.Google Scholar

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40 Rancière, Jacques, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009).Google Scholar

41 Rancière, Jacques, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Rancière's framework developed against distinct frustrations with the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu's model of ‘cultural capital’ famously embeds culture within a field of struggle: one that works to exclude those who, without the requisite forms of cultural capital, are unable to ‘decode’ aesthetic experience. While recognizing ideological power structures similarly, as Caroline Pelletier points out, Rancière nonetheless disagreed with Bourdieu's starting point: ‘a position in which inequality is assumed’. In other words, Rancière's challenge was to the Bourdieuian model's politically neutered potentiality, which viewed inequality as the inevitable consequence of antagonistic knowledge. Rancière argued that in order to achieve equality we must work ‘to assume it, to affirm it, to have it as one's epistemological starting point, and to then systematically verify it’. Caroline Pelletier, ‘Emancipation, Equality and Education’, Discourse, 30, 2 (2009), pp. 137–50, here p. 142.

42 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 13.

43 Martin Barker, ‘I Have Seen the Future and it is Not Here Yet. . .; Or, on Being Ambitious for Audience Research’, The Communication Review, 9, 2 (2006), pp. 123–41, here p. 134.

44 It is worth noting that theatre studies is not the first to develop such creative techniques. To offer just a few such instances: in Watching Dallas Ang reports receiving forty-two letters in response to a magazine advert; Barker's study of 2000AD readers involved posting respondents a sheet of questions and a blank audio cassette; and Karen Wood's research into Strictly Come Dancing asked respondents to keep a ten-week diary of personal reflections on the show. Barker, Martin, ‘Kicked into the Gutters’, International Journal of Comic Art, 4, 1 (2002), pp. 64–77 Google Scholar; Wood, Karen, ‘An Investigation into Audiences’ Televisual Experience of Strictly Come Dancing ’, Participations, 7, 2 (2010), pp. 262–91.Google Scholar

45 Gröschel, Uwe, ‘Researching Audiences through Walking Fieldwork’, Participations, 12, 1 (May 2015), pp. 349–67.Google Scholar

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47 Lisa Baxter, Daragh O'Reilly and Elizabeth Carnegie, ‘Innovative Methods of Inquiry into Arts Engagement’, in Radbourne, Glow and Johanson, The Audience Experience, pp. 113–28.

48 Stella Duffy, ‘Excellence in the Arts Should Not Be Defined by the Metropolitan Elite’, The Guardian, 30 June 2017, at www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/30/excellence-arts-should-not-be-defined-by-metropolitan-elite, accessed 2 September 2017.

49 Jim Aitchison. ‘Response to Stella Duffy on the Arts, Elitism, and Communities’, 6 July 2017, at www.ianpace.wordpress.com/2017/07/06/response-to-stella-duffy-on-the-arts-elitism-and-communities, accessed 2 September 2017.

50 Reinelt, ‘What UK Spectators Know’, p. 338.

51 See also Goode, Chris, ‘The Audience Is Listening’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 21, 4 (2011), pp. 464–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 468. Kosidowski, Paul, ‘Thinking through the Audience’, Theatre Topics, 13, 1, pp. 83–86, here p. 84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Goode and Kosidowski both valuably critique the lowest-common-denominator position, arguing that listening to audiences does not necessarily present the risk to theatre that is often assumed.

52 McConachie, Bruce and Elizabeth Hart, F., Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (London: Routledge, 2006), p. ix.Google Scholar

53 Reason, Matthew, ‘Asking the Audience: Audience Research and the Experience of Theatre’, About Performance, 10 (2010), 15–34, here p. 26.Google Scholar

54 See Sedgman, Locating the Audience, for a more thoroughly grounded explanation.

55 Ibid, p. 87.

56 Ibid, p. 86.

57 I was able to explore this argument in much more detail in my article ‘Ladies and Gentlemen Follow Me, Please Put on Beards’, Your, Contemporary Theatre Review, 27, 2 (2017), pp. 158–76Google Scholar.

58 Sedgman, Locating the Audience, pp. 164–65.

59 Old Vic and Sadler's Wells Trust, Annual Reports for Season 1948–1949, University of Bristol Theatre Collection, OV/F/000038, p. 5.

60 John Moody, letter dated 14 August 1958 to Peter Shaffer about his play The Salt Land, University of Bristol Theatre Collection, Box 521.

61 Sedgman, Locating the Audience, p. 21.

62 Matt Trueman, ‘Why I'm Worried about the Decline of Theatre Blogs’, The Stage, 15 December 2016, at https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/2016/matt-trueman-why-im-worried-about-the-decline-of-theatre-blogs, accessed 21 November 2017.

63 Ibid.

64 See, for example, the critiques cited earlier by Goode, ‘The Audience Is Listening’; Kosidowski, ‘Thinking through the Audience’.

65 Freshwater, Theatre & Audience, p. 6.

66 Kosidowski, ‘Thinking through the Audience’, p. 84.