Drip-fed up: why don't theatres get Twitter?

In recent weeks, those of you on Twitter will have found it difficult to avoid BetFair Poker. The account is producing fun material at a remarkable rate – almost none of which has anything to do with poker. The tweets are mostly either faux-motivational gobbets or surreal and rambling narratives unfolding over several tweets. Here's the first of a little series I enjoyed recently:

We've all been informed that our annual bonus will be decided by our ability to create a Faster-Than-Light drive in the next 45 minutes.

What starts as a mildly satirical vignette moves up through several gears in a journey to the centre of the sun – without losing that mild satirical sting. Some of you will dismiss this as trivial and silly, and of course you will be right. And if you've just scrolled through it having linked to the account above, I hope you enjoyed it. But you won't have got the best out of it. Rather than being gobbled up, it's designed to be drip-fed on alongside all your other tweets from Stephen Fry and Barack Obama and that guy who wrote that show you once saw. It's doing something tastily different with the form, without being so unusual as to be indigestible.

Compare this with the Twitter feed of your local theatre. Bland nuggets of fact and instamatic retweetings of praise, right? I follow most of the theatres I've found on Twitter. Their tone is near-identical. In one sense it's hardly surprising. Twitter (and other social media) are so new that we still think of them as simply media for imparting information, particularly if we work in marketing and imparting information is a big part of our job. But a well-designed poster can be about more than simply imparting information. It's about atmospheres and ideas and it's part of the narrative. At its best it can be an art form in its own right. So why not the Twitter feed?

In another sense, it's incredibly surprising. Here's the strong version of that argument: given an opportunity to do something creative in an entirely new medium, the theatres, some of the most creative organisations in the world, instead see a plain tool with a plain function. Meanwhile an online poker website steals the march. There are good Twitter feeds in the theatre world. The best of them are personable, chatty and full of provocative questions. But that's a long way from making art.

There have been attempts to create drama for Twitter. (At some point someone will coin the conflation "twama" and we will all be forced to send them to Twoventry.) The RSC's Such Tweet Sorrow, a retelling of Romeo and Juliet via Twitter, was a thrill, but by deciding to have it tweeted by actors it was hamstrung. There are some great actors tweeting brilliant material, but the skill of acting well is irrelevant to the skill of writing well for Twitter. They should have used writers.

There have been successes, too, most notably Dan Rebellato's series of tweets entering the mind of Raoul Moat. This series was particularly thrilling, because it gave the lie to the idea that in order to be successful on Twitter, you have to be a standup. Sure, funny material gets attention. But it is possible to create something much nearer the knuckle and still make a success of it.

And it's not as though @betfairpoker is this century's Dickens. It has created some memorable characters, some enjoyable storylines and some cracking comic lines. It's The IT Crowd. That's an improvement on bland fact, but when do we get The Wire?

This is a genuine challenge to theatres. Why is it left to a few individuals and a poker website to explore this new medium's creative possibilities, when an art form that spends its time commissioning writers, generating stories and creating characters to tell them, is instead using it to tell us when we can catch the open dress rehearsal? One answer is obvious: because they're theatres, not a digital arts organisation. But just because I occasionally play a guitar doesn't mean I'm not a theatre director. Just because Fuel are creating a series of podcasts doesn't mean they're not theatre producers. It's possible to create in more than one medium. Later this year I'm part of a team at Pilot theatre who'll be giving Twitter drama a go, but that doesn't stop Pilot from making theatre.

I love theatre above any art form and will defend to the death the beautiful simplicity of a group of people in a room, together, sharing a story or an experience. But artists should see new media as a challenge. Let's make a drama for Twitter that could only unfold on Twitter.