The British Theatre Guide is an on-line database of specially commissioned reviews of theatre productions throughout the United Kingdom, together with theatre-related news reports, interviews with leading theatre practitioners, obituaries and comprehensive annual obituary listings.
It also commissions reviews of opera and dance, as well as books, audio recordings and DVDs.
In addition The British Theatre Guide provides full reviews of Edinburgh Festival theatre events and links to news and reviews of amateur, student, youth and school productions in the UK.
Access to its database, a stable archive, is free to all users via alphabetic and subject indexes.
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The British Theatre Guide site and archive were founded on 18 November 2001 by its current editor, Peter Lathan, a former drama teacher. Lathan, who also writes plays and runs a small-scale professional theatre company, has been active in the field of on-line theatre databases since 1996.
As of 2011, the British Theatre Guide has a UK-based team of 30 established theatre reviewers, plus overseas contributors, including correspondents from New York and France.
The London editor is Philip Fisher who runs a small team of critics in the Greater London Area, including three members of The Critics' Circle. The north west editor is David Chadderton, who is also a member of the Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards panel.
By May 2008 The British Theatre Guide archive, with over 10,000 pages of on-line reviews and news, was receiving more than 120,000 page views each week. In addition its free weekly Newsletter is emailed to 3,200 subscribers worldwide.[1]
Intute, a university-based service which finds, evaluates and catalogues the best internet resources for education and research, reported in these terms on The British Theatre Guide (September 2005):