Overview
All the countless hours you’ve spent agonising over filters and hashtags are finally about to pay off. In a promotional exercise for their latest production Meme Girls, Malthouse Theatre are giving away free tickets to some of Melbourne’s most influential social media users.
The giveaway is open to anyone who has cultivated more than 5000 followers on either Instagram or Twitter. If that’s you, simply email boxoffice@malthouse.com.au with your name and social media handle, and you can bag two tickets to the Wednesday, April 22, show. But you're not just scoring free tickets for nothing. Malthouse will encourage audience members to tweet and Instagram throughout the performance.
It’s a bold move, one that theatres have trialled in the past to no small amount of controversy. Malthouse themselves made headlines in 2012 when they designated special 'tweet seats' for social media users. The LA Times technology blog attributes the first instance of live theatre tweeting to a 2009 staging of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore in Kansas, during which audience members in the 100 special seats of the final performance could access tweets from the show’s artistic director about the production, scenery and story unfurling on stage while tweeting their own questions and comments. Arguably one of its most successful and interesting uses was for director Ivo van Hove's media reportage-inspired Roman Tragedies at Adelaide Festival 2014, where audience members were encourage to tweet and become part of the show — The Lifted Brow even wrote an 'almost live review'.
Whether live social media use works for Meme Girls remains to be seen. The show itself is the latest tongue-in-cheek work from actor and theatre-maker Ash Flanders, and has been described by Malthouse as “a love letter to the bizarre and addictive women of YouTube who broadcast their lives into the abyss.” So we're in the right online social territory. It could work. It might even be the best night to see it.
Malthouse's season of Meme Girls runs until May 2. People with less than 5000 social media followers are also welcome to attend on April 22 — by buying a ticket at the Malthouse website.
By Tom Clift and Rima Sabina Aouf.