Cloudflare outage; e-tickets v paper tickets; UK Government v ticket touts; new podcast episode: new company to honour Buzz Goodbody set up by her nephew
Cloudflare outage; e-tickets v paper tickets; UK Government v ticket touts; new podcast episode: new company to honour Buzz Goodbody set up by her nephew
News, reviews, features and podcast on theatre across the UK
The British Theatre Guide Newsletter
No 1239: 23 November 2025
Editorial
A month ago, I wrote in this newsletter how we weren’t affected by the Amazon Internet outage at one US data centre that took down services from banks, government services and even doorbell cameras here in the UK. Then on Monday, Cloudflare went down, and took BTG down with it.
Cloudflare is a huge worldwide network that sit between web sites like ours and our visitors, caching pages to provide a faster response and reduce pressure on our web servers and blocking a great deal of malicious web traffic and, for someone as small as us, most of what they offer is completely free of charge. Their service is invaluable and rarely fails, but when it does, it can be catastrophic when so much of the Web runs through one company’s servers.
We could do nothing but wait for them to fix it, but I just felt sorry for the engineers who must have been under immense pressure to track down and fix the problem while the whole world was watching and waiting.
There was another failure this week in tech when one of my local theatres told reviewers it was switching to e-tickets—but none of us received them, so we got old-fashioned paper tickets after all. We even got a programme with cast biogs instead of just a list of names with a QR code to where we could read about them for the first time at this theatre for a while.
While there is an argument for the convenience of e-tickets—and of course the theatres can collect contact details for marketing more easily—they aren’t really much of a souvenir. There’s a difference between someone posting a photo of their ticket for the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1976 and a screen grab of a confirmation e-mail. Which are you most likely to find in museums of the future?
Also on tickets, while some are holding their breath for the Budget announcement this week, the UK government has finally pledged to do something about those who profiteer from tickets for popular sport, music and theatre events, as Philip Fisher discusses in his feature. I remember when ticket touts were the people who used to hang around outside football grounds reselling tickets or work the queues at the Leicester Square ticket booth shouting “Phantom, Les Mis, Cats…”. Now they are far more sophisticated and can make millions from a single sold-out event like the Oasis tour, buying tickets up before true fans can get hold of them and selling them on for many times their face value.
On a rather smaller scale, one event I spoke to someone about this week had just a couple of tickets left, which have probably gone by now. This is an evening dedicated to the memory of Buzz Goodbody, the first female director at the RSC who was instrumental in creating The Other Place, the company’s alternative Stratford venue, who died 50 years ago at the age of 28. Speakers include one past and one current RSC Artistic Director: Trevor Nunn and Tamara Harvey.
This is actually a side-event to the inaugural production of Buzz Studios, created by Buzz’s nephew, Adam Goodbody, in his aunt’s honour. The play is Petty Men, currently running at London’s Arcola Theatre, created by Adam with his co-performer John Chisham and their director, Júlia Levai, and set backstage where two understudies for a production of Julius Caesar are attempting to out-perform the show relay.
I spoke to Adam and John for this week’s new podcast episode about the play, but they also talked passionately about the importance of theatre education, and particularly Shakespeare education, something which, as you may know, is a subject that is also close to my heart.
Tina – The Tina Turner Musical (Stage Entertainment, Joop van den Ende and Tali Pelman, in association with Tina Turner) - Palace Theatre, Manchester, –
Midsomer Murders: The Killings at Badger’s Drift (Bentley Productions [for ITV] in association with All3Media International) - The Crucible / Lyceum Theatre / Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse, Sheffield, –
The BFG (Royal Shakespeare Company, Chichester Festival Theatre and Roald Dahl Story Company) - Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, –
FRIENDS! The Musical Parody (Mark Goucher, Matthew Gale and Oskar Eiriksson in association with The Barn Theatre Cirencester) - Malvern Theatres, Malvern, –
The Sleeping Beauty (English National Ballet) - Mayflower Theatre, Southampton, –
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Elliott & Harper Productions and Catherine Schreiber, based on the original Leeds Playhouse production) - Theatre Royal, Plymouth, –
