Let's try to preserve performances online

Years of disuse have taken their toll on my memory. Like Lyn Gardner compiling her list of "favourite homegrown physical and visual theatre shows", I can be fairly certain that I have seen some excellent ones, yet some of the crucial details prove elusive. I fear that I've imagined them all. What was so crazily inspiring about Ian Judge's Comedy of Errors at the RSC about 15 years ago? Was it the colourful costumes and monochrome set, or was it the verse-speaking? What happened in Theatre de Complicite's Street of Crocodiles, besides a visual gag with a cigar and a giant beast made of actors slouching across the stage? And what was the title of that play at the Bush with a chef sharpening a blade and muttering to himself? He would speed up the sharpening as he muttered more ferociously, then he would slow down, sternly surveying the audience. You know the one . . .

There can be no exact recapture, as Lyn says, of last night's show - let alone last century's. But perhaps the internet can jog my memory. I can lazily search for Judge's Comedy of Errors and reassure myself that I didn't hallucinate its barmier moments. I can pretend to have seen Tim Supple's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream so that next time somebody tells me how wonderful it is, I can offer my carefully considered reservations. And I can find out exactly where the guitarist sits in Gregory Doran's puppet version of Venus and Adonis.

I had imagined blogs would be very helpful in this respect - that 10 reviewers are better than (n)one, if only because they will remember and blog about 10 different things. But the strange thing is this: often they don't. They mention the same things, like how the second half of The Wonderful World of Dissocia was a bit different from the first. Or that Daniel Radcliffe took off his clothes in Equus, but I wasn't interested in that at all, to be honest, I just can't remember the rest of the play ...

It doesn't help that description is at the mercy of opinion. If people hate something, they say so and then add "but I liked the bit when . . .". On the other hand, everybody's noticed that the Indian Dream is linguistically a bit unusual, but few bloggers have bothered to concentrate on the blank verse that is sometimes spoken in that production.

Let's suppose that, in the future, a theatre researcher wants to know what the entire performance of a certain play was like, or even how a single scene or speech worked. Could it be done using what's online right now? I suspect that our hypothetical nostalgist/academic would find it difficult. There would be plenty of enthusiastic recommendations hanging around, electronically archived and still exhorting you to kill for some long-gone-cold hot ticket. But beyond that? When it comes to reviewing, are theatre blogs so very different from newspaper reviews? And if not, should they be?

Perhaps it is neither possible nor necessary to remember every detail of every performance. But there's all that open, virtual space out there, just waiting to be filled with loving descriptions of performances from as many points of view as there are seats in the house; more, anyway, than "Saw play last night. It was good. Bloke off of telly were in it." And a broken link.