From The Guardian: How do you measure theatre success?

A group of the UK theatre world’s leading industry bodies – The Society of London Theatre, Theatrical Management Association and Independent Theatre Council – have recently come up with what they believe is a completely new way of measuring the effectiveness (or otherwise) of a theatre production.

Instead of relying on box office figures, social monitoring or critics’ reviews, the group have designed a system which aims to assess the quality of a show based on an audience’s emotional response.

It takes the form of a questionnaire handed out to audiences after a production, which asks questions along the lines of whether they felt challenged, moved or engaged by the show and whether they noticed time passing during it. The answers are then brought together to give an overall measurement of the audience’s response, in the form of a graph. Broadly speaking, the larger the area covered on the graph, the more successful the show has been.