50 2026). While this data is specific to the UK context, it offers evidence for understanding the structural conditions of professional performance more broadly. As Alex Macqueen, Actor and Chair of the Actors’ Trust, acknowledges in the report’s foreword, “the joy we create for audiences too often comes at a personal cost that remains unseen” (Macqueen 2026:4). Social media has not created these conditions. But adding platform visibility as a new professional requirement has imposed an additional, largely uncompensated form of labour on a workforce already operating under significant strain. Terranova describes this exhaustion as embedded in the structure of free labour itself, noting that late capitalism “exhausts it by subtracting selectively but widely the means through which that labour can reproduce itself: from the burnout syndromes of Internet start-ups to under retribution and exploitation in the cultural economy at large” (Terranova 2000: 51). Hannah Lowther’s experience illustrates this pressure with clarity. What makes her situation analytically significant is not simply that she faced online criticism but that she describes it as having become normal. A performer making a human mistake during a live performance has always been part of theatre’s reality. Social media has changed that. Performers with public platforms are permanently visible and documented; ordinary human mistakes become permanent public records, judged by people who were not in the theatre and lack the context to understand what they are seeing. Lowther describes a video surfacing of her making a mistake during an early performance of Six, saying, “my first thought was: I’m going to get ripped to shreds online, and that’s exactly what happened” (Lowther, cited in Ryan 2025). She describes dealing with online criticism as having “begun to feel normal” and acknowledges that “I forget that, for lots of people, it is not a daily struggle” (Lowther, cited in Ryan 2025). The fact that she has internalised this as normal is not a sign of resilience. It is a sign of how deeply the structural pressure has embedded itself into the professional experience of performers who maintain public platforms. The platform does not close when the show closes. The performer remains on stage, permanently, whether they choose to or not. Mulvaney’s experience extends this argument further. As she stated in April 2026, “I am giving 125% at every performance because I know how lucky I am to be here”, and cautioned that “it’s not best to publicly rip me to shreds in the comments because people are watching and deciding if it’s worth putting trans people in their shows” (Mulvaney, cited in Gioia 2026). Mulvaney is not simply managing her own experience of online hate. She is aware that how she is treated publicly will deter- mine whether institutions cast trans performers in future. The personal cost of that dual performance is considerable and is borne by the performer rather than the institution that benefits from it. The hate directed at both Lowther and Mulvaney is not a malfunction of the system. It is the system producing exactly the kind of sustained engagement that platform logic rewards.
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