Studying European Theatre Audiences: The STEP City Study

How do audiences experience theatre? How does it vary across theatrical styles, countries and systems? How can researchers understand and compare the values theatre holds for its audiences?
This book reports on one of the largest co-ordinated efforts to survey the theatrical audience experience, the City Study of the Project on European Theatre Systems, which conducted over 7000 surveys and dozens of interviews and focus groups with audience members from four mid-sized cities across Europe. This study aimed to capture the details of how audiences perceive and value theatre, and resulted in a data set which, while imperfect, has no precedent in scale and comparability for theatre studies.
Based on this very large data set, this book offers a portrait of the European theatrical audience, its experiences, and how it values theatre, that is more detailed and incisive than any previously available. The question is not just who comes to theatre, but why, and how those experiences are valuable to them. This makes the book essential reading for those interested in studying theatre’s place in society, but also for artists, policy-makers, and arts professionals who want to make and share work with an understanding of their audience’s engagement with it. This book’s key contribution, however, is methodological: it offers a detailed and unsparing examination of the City Study’s working methods—their underlying theory, their strengths and
weaknesses, and which survey and interview techniques were more successful in bringing out useful information. This is useful for researchers and professionals who want to make use of research techniques themselves to learn more about their own audiences, both present and future.