A Guy, A Girl and Shakespeare – My Blind Date Experience

When a theatre company tweets the following, what do you do?

You apply to go on a Blind Date, of course!

“Why?!” I hear you ask. Curiosity. I definitely don’t get to the theatre as often as I’d like, and I’m single, so why on earth not?

So, after an email from ATG’s Content and Social Media Executive, Lauren Ball, I ventured to the Noel Coward Theatre in Central London last night to see Shakespeare In Love with my blind date.

I had no idea who my date would be (because, it is a blind date), what to expect from the performance or the date itself. I was a nervous wreck!

I arrived to work yesterday in a shirt and tie, which is a lot smarter than usual. My boss asked me if I was off to a job interview! So, of course I had to tell him the reason I was dressed to impress. He thought it was via Tinder, but when I explained it was actually organised via Twitter, I’m not sure if that made it better or worse…

I arrived a bit earlier than expected, collected my ticket then waited in the foyer for the Duty Manager and my date.

My date walked through the door collected her ticket in a similar brown envelope. We spotted each other and check our tickets to discover we were each other’s date!

Becca and I were shown to the bar by the Duty Manager, where we were given complimentary drinks and got to know each other.

It turned out we had a fair amount in common; I went to university near her hometown, she’s also been involved in Scouting and we both didn’t expect to be chosen for the blind date! We were talking for so long that we didn’t hear the announcement to take our seats in the main house and realised with only a few minutes to spare! When we got into the house, we found we had some fantastic seats, with a great view.

Shakespeare In Love itself was very enjoyable. Being the geek that I am, I was very intrigued by the set design and how the main centrepiece moved to create fantastic spaces on stage. And of course, I noticed that no-one was wearing mics and instead they had off stage mics picking up all the vocals, speech and instruments.
The cast were fantastic as well, certainly making me believe that I was actually seeing a young William Shakespeare on stage!

Becca had seen the production before Christmas but with a different cast and sung its praises. This gave me high expectations of the performance ahead for us, and fortunately for her it certainly exceeded them!

During the interval, I found some cards laying around the auditorium. They had the Shakespeare In Love logo on them, with a moustache. The idea was that you took a selfie with it and shared it along with a hashtag. We decided we’d do it after the show as a momento of our evening and share it with ATG.

We did a very 21st century thing after this photo; exchanged Twitter follows instead of phone numbers!

After we parted ways for the evening, Lauren at ATG sent us a ‘feedback’ form for the evening.

We were asked about our first impressions, what we talked about, how the date ended and about our date’s theatre etiquette. I’m pretty sure I was fidgeting throughout the first half!

As well as our date at the Noel Coward Theatre, two others were happening at the same time. After a bit of digging around on Twitter, I found that one was at Once and the other at My Night With Reg.

Lauren has posted the feedback from everyone on the ATG blog, and even added our selfie to it!

The summary of my first ever blind date; it was a fantastic production with wonderful company.