Cake and champagne

Theatre Notes celebrates its second birthday this month: it was in June 2004 that my lightbulb moment happened and I started blogging theatre. Since then, the archive has built up reviews of almost 100 shows, which constitutes a record, if necessarily partial, of Melbourne theatre over the past two years. And I've also blogged various meditations on this and that. That's quite a lot of theatre, and quite a lot of writing.

The blog's certainly evolved since I began. And readership has been steadily growing, especially in the past six months. In the past year we've had 27,990 unique visitors, an average of 75 visitors a day, although since the beginning of this year that weekly average has doubled to between 145 to 220 visitors per day. TN readers are from all over the place: mainly Australia (around 60 per cent), and around a third from the US, with rest from a miscellany of different countries - the UK, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Lithuania - (hello, Bolivia!) Then there are all the people who tell me they print out the reviews and share them around. And that doesn't count the readers at State of the Arts, where my reviews are, as it were, reprinted: I don't know what the stats are for them, but their e-letter goes out to around 10,000 people every week. Yes sirree, somebody's reading us. Even better, people are using the comments, and there have been some lively and interesting discusssions, such as these recent comments on independent theatre.

I have a largish novel to write in the second half of this year, so will have to scale back a bit - more than two shows a week is impossible to handle here, though I hate turning people down. But TN is going to be around for a while yet. My thanks to everyone - readers and theatre artists and companies - who make it all possible. And thanks especially to those who have written me so many supportive emails; you make me feel it's all worthwhile. Prost!