After a seemingly harmless tweet
Updating to add: The Independent reporting wasn’t very thorough. Tim Roberts seems to be pretty much on a level with the fans who trolled him.
Good grief.
The Independent reports:
A veteran stage technician, who worked in the West End for more than three decades, has quit his job after a social media row with fans of actor Benedict Cumberbatch.
Tim Roberts walked away from his position as a light technician for The Phantom of the Opera last week after a seemingly harmless tweet he posted on his own account escalated into a row with self-styled “Cumberbitches”.
His messages prompted Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Theatres (RUT), which runs Her Majesty’s Theatre where Phantom is staged, to threaten him with disciplinary measures.
Mr Roberts criticised the company for “suppressing freedom of speech” among employees and he now fears he is unemployable in the West End.
He tweeted something critical about Cumberbatch’s Hamlet and the fan frenzy around it.
The tweet sparked a furious response from some fans who trolled his Twitter feed and even sent death threats.
Because that’s what you do.
Roberts responded rudely, and someone sent the whole thing to management at RUT, which opened an investigation.
The technician, who worked on Phantom for four years as well as Starlight Express and Bugsy Malone in the 1980s, was told disciplinary measures could be taken. “At that point I decided I would walk because I didn’t want to go through disciplinary,” he said.
So that’s his life ruined, because he said he didn’t admire Cumberbatch as Hamlet.