Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice (Shakespeare in Practice) 3031057627, 9783031057625

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SHAKESPEARE IN PRACTICE

Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice Erin Sullivan

Shakespeare in Practice

Series Editors Bridget Escolme, London, UK Stuart Hampton-Reeves, Coventry, UK

The books in this series chart new directions for a performance approach to Shakespeare, representing the diverse and exciting work being undertaken by a new generation of Shakespeareans and combining insights from both scholarship and theatrical practice.

Erin Sullivan

Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice

Erin Sullivan Shakespeare Institute University of Birmingham Stratford-upon-Avon, UK

Shakespeare in Practice ISBN 978-3-031-05762-5 ISBN 978-3-031-05763-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05763-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: From ‘The Under Presents: Tempest ’ (2020) by Tender Claws This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my parents—Marla, Rick, Lisa, and Tim—and my brother Ryan. Thank goodness for digital technology.

Acknowledgements

I knew when I started this book that I would be studying a constantly changing field, but I had no idea just how much the ground would shift from start to finish. I am enormously grateful to everyone who supported me along the way. Thank you first of all to my students, and especially the distance learners, who have shown me just how meaningful digital presence can be. Thank you too to my series editors Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme, who encouraged me to pursue this research and supported me as it slowly manifested itself as a book, and to my Palgrave editors, Eileen Srebernik, Jack Heeney, Immy Higgins, and Preetha Kuttiappan, who offered indispensable intellectual and practical assistance along the way. I am so grateful to my digital Shakespeare friends, Pascale Aebischer, Gemma Kate Allred, Benjamin Broadribb, Katherine Steele Brokaw, Rebecca Bushnell, Rob Conkie, Gabriel Egan, Susanne Greenhalgh, Peter Holland, Eric Johnson, Peter Kirwan, Vladimir Makarov, David McInnis, Rachael Nicholas, Stephen Purcell, Paul Prescott, Will Sharpe, Elizabeth Sharrock, and John Wyver, who responded to draft material, shared their own work-in-progress, attended countless digital performances, and talked with me in person, in conferences, and on Twitter about this dynamic and sometimes dizzying field. It’s been such a pleasure to be in conversation with you. Very special thanks are due to Peter Kirwan for supporting this book from the outset, to Pascale Aebischer for offering extraordinary mentorship and friendship as it progressed, and to Stuart Hampton-Reeves, Rob Conkie, Paul

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Prescott, Katherine Steele Brokaw, and Pascale again for reading all or part of the manuscript. Their probing, expert, and constructive feedback has been indispensable. It goes without saying that weaknesses that remain are my own. Many creative practitioners and arts programmers have influenced my thinking and furthered this research by offering their time, access to performance recordings, and permission to reproduce images of their work. They include Clifford Allen, Dim Balsem, Kyle Bradshaw, Katie Day, Annie Dorsen, Geraldine Collinge, Ben Crystal, Sarah Ellis, Samantha Gorman, Sean Hagerty, Kati Mitchell, Michelle Morton, Rob Myles, J Noland, Crissy O’Donovan, Sinéad Owens, Keith Pattison, Matt Peel, Megan Price, Lara Ratnaraja, Johan Reyniers, Rhian Richards, Christoph Schletz, Zoë Seaton, Charlene V. Smith, Tea Uglow, William Wolfgang, John Wyver, and Hannah Young. Thank you all for your generosity and your theatrical risk-taking, without which a study like this would never exist, and thank you in particular to Zoë Seaton and John Wyver for graciously agreeing to be interviewed by me for the book. There are a huge number of friends and colleagues who have supported me and influenced my thinking in more ways than I can list here. They include Thea Buckley, Michael Bartelle, Margaret Bartley, Gina Bloom, David Sterling Brown, Karin Brown, Judith Buchanan, Maurizio Calbi, Deborah Cartmell, Jessica Chiba, Ellie Collins, Kerry Cooke, Juliet Creese, Thomas Dixon, Michael Dobson, Cait Fannin Peel, Ewan Fernie, Barbara Fuchs, David Gould, Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Ronan Hatfull, Ella Hawkins, Matt Hayler, Mattias Heim, Diana Henderson, Victoria Jackson, Elizabeth Jeffery, John Jowett, Andy Kesson, Anne Kosseff-Jones, Chris Laoutaris, Tom Lockwood, Georgie Lucas, Sonia Massai, Harry McCarthy, Emer McHugh, Paul Menzer, Alfredo Michel Modenessi, Andrew Murphy, Harry Newman, Hannah Newton, Mary Odbert, Sarah Olive, Stephen O’Neill, Eoin Price, Kate Robinson and the RSC Nursery, Abigail Rokison-Woodall, Kate Rumbold, Eleanor Rycroft, Rachel Sherman, Elizabeth Sharrett, Simon Smith, Robert Stagg, Tiffany Stern, Caridad Svich, Will Tattersdill, Todd Taylor, Alex Thom, Billie Thomas, Whitney Trettian, Elizabeth Walsh, Kate Welch, Rebecca White, Martin Wiggins, Jessica Wolfe, Nigel Wood, and Penelope Woods. Finally, thank you to the wonderfully helpful librarians and archivists at the Folger Shakespeare Library, National Theatre Archive, New York Public Library Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Library and Archive, and Shakespeare Institute Library.

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This book benefitted from a Folger Shakespeare Library Short-term Fellowship in 2017, a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant in 2020–2, and study leave from the University of Birmingham in 2017 and 2022. Part of Chapter 2 first appeared as ‘The Audience Is Present: Aliveness, Social Media, and the Theatre Broadcast Experience’ (2018), in Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Laurie Osborne (eds) Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience (London: Bloomsbury), 59–75. Part of Chapter 3 first appeared as ‘“The Forms of Things Unknown”: Shakespeare and the Rise of the Live Broadcast’ (2017), Shakespeare Bulletin 35:4, 627–62, available online: https://doi.org/10. 1353/shb.2017.0047. Part of Chapter 5 first appeared as ‘Shakespeare, Social Media, and the Digital Public Sphere’ (2018), Shakespeare 14:1, 64–79, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2018.143 9092. I am grateful to Bloomsbury, Johns Hopkins University Press, and Taylor and Francis for permission to republish this material. As always, my greatest debt is to my family, whose loving presence, felt both in person and online, endlessly enriches my own hybrid life. To Will, my other self—thank you for everything. To Ada, our little marvel of the digital age—welcome to this strange world. To Mom, Dad, Lisa, Tim, Ryan—thank you for being there for me, even though we’re an ocean apart. This one is for you.

Note on the Text All references to Shakespeare’s plays are from The Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works (2005), ed. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells, 2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Contents

1

Introduction

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Being There

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3

The Broadcast Stage

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4

Mediated Performance

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5

Born-Digital Theatre

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Conclusion

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In Practice: Interviews with Two Practitioners

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

Fig. 3.4

A Piece of Work (2013), directed by Annie Dorsen (Photograph by Bruno Pocheron and reproduced courtesy of Annie Dorsen) Ticket stub for Richard Burton’s Electronovision Hamlet (1964), directed by John Gielgud for the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre (Owned and photographed by Erin Sullivan) The Duchess of Gloucester (Jane Lapotaire) at her husband’s coffin as The Queen (Emma Hamilton) looks on in the opening moments of the broadcast of Richard II (2013), directed for the stage by Gregory Doran and for the screen by Robin Lough for the Royal Shakespeare Company (Screenshot) Iago (Rory Kinnear) and Roderigo (Tom Robertson) in the opening moments of the broadcast of Othello (2013), directed for the stage by Nicholas Hytner and for the screen by Robin Lough for the National Theatre (Screenshots) Solanio (Regé-Jean Page), Antonio (Dominic Mafham), and Salarino (Brian Martin) in the opening moments of the recording of The Merchant of Venice (2015), directed for the stage by Jonathan Munby and for the screen by Robin Lough for Shakespeare’s Globe (Screenshots)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3.5

Fig. 3.6

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 4.6

The camera view for the livestream of Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare (2016), directed by Tim Etchells for Forced Entertainment and featuring Cathy Naden performing The Winter’s Tale (Screenshot) Oberon (David Harewood) reacts in close up to Titania’s (Tina Benko’s) speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2013), directed by Julie Taymor for Theatre for a New Audience (Screenshot) Hamletmachine (1986), directed by Robert Wilson for New York University (Photograph by Friedemann Simon and reproduced courtesy of The Watermill Center) On-stage audiences watch Caesar on stage (bottom centre) and on screen in Roman Tragedies (2007–), directed by Ivo van Hove for Toneelgroep Amsterdam (Photograph by Jan Versweyveld and reproduced courtesy of Internationaal Theater Amsterdam) Audience members watching Coriolanus (Richard Lynch) while wearing headsets and with hanging screens in the background in Coriolan/us (2012), directed by Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson for National Theatre Wales (Photograph by Mark Douet and reproduced courtesy of National Theatre Wales) The Duke (Zubin Varla) and Claudio (Ivanno Jeremiah), enlarged and reproduced, in Measure for Measure (2015), directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins for the Young Vic (Photograph by Keith Pattison and reproduced courtesy of him) Troilus (Scott Shepherd) standing in front of a tepee and mounted video monitors in Troilus and Cressida (2012), co-directed by Elizabeth LeCompte and Mark Ravenhill for The Wooster Group and the Royal Shakespeare Company (Photograph by Hugo Glendinning © RSC and reproduced courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company) Prospero (Simon Russell Beale), Ariel (Mark Quartley), and the digital avatar in The Tempest (2016), directed by Gregory Doran for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in collaboration with Intel and Imaginarium Studios (Photograph by Topher McGrillis © RSC and reproduced courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5

Fig. 5.6

Fig. 6.1

Playing cards from ‘The Shakspere Oracle’ party game [1892, ART flat c25] (Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License) The digital stage for Such Tweet Sorrow (2010), directed by Roxana Silbert for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Mudlark (Screenshot) The digital stage for Midsummer Night’s Dreaming (2013), co-created by Gregory Doran, Sarah Ellis, and Tea Uglow for the Royal Shakespeare Company in collaboration with Google+ (Screenshot) Hamlet (Jack Cutmore-Scott) surrounded by objects from the production’s detailed set in Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit (2019), adapted and directed by Steven Maler for the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company in collaboration with Google. Production and cinematography by Sensorium, costume and production design by Clint Ramos, technical direction by Matthew Niederhauser and John Fitzgerald (Photograph by Matthew Niederhauser and reproduced courtesy of the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company) Lady Macbeth (Katrina Allen), Macbeth (Maryam Grace), and the audience chat after the banquet in Macbeth (2020), directed by Rob Myles for The Show Must Go Online (Screenshot) Macbeth (Dennis Herdman) and Banquo (Dharmesh Patel) sharing the digital stage through Zoom spotlighting in Macbeth (2020), directed by Zoë Seaton for Big Telly (Screenshot) Puck (EM Williams) in both the digital world and motion capture studio in Dream (2021), directed by Robin McNicholas for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Marshmallow Laser Feast, and other partners (Screenshot)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In the twenty-first century, nothing has changed how people experience the world more than digital technology. Alongside the rapid mechanization of the industrial revolution, and the ferocious spread of knowledge that came with the printing press before that, the advances of the digital age stand among the most transformative events in human history. How we share and store information, how we organize social relations, even how we think and behave: all have been profoundly influenced by the ever-expanding reach of digital technology and especially the mobile computer, something we deceptively still call a phone. This book explores the impact of such changes on theatrical performance—often seen as one of the most live, unmediated, and therefore human forms of art—and the plays of William Shakespeare, thought by many to offer some of the most penetrating examinations of what it means to be human. What happens when actors, directors, and audiences start using new technologies to reimagine the meaning of Shakespeare’s words, characters, and ideas in performance? How does the way we experience presence, locate emotion, and forge community through Shakespearean drama change with the influence of digital media? This book argues that digitally intensive performances of Shakespeare allow actors and audiences to test what they believe theatre to be, as well as to reflect on what it means to be present—with a work of art, with others, and with oneself— in an increasingly online world. I contend that if theatre as an art form is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Sullivan, Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice, Shakespeare in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05763-2_1

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to remain socially relevant and philosophically engaged, then it must be one that grapples with digital technologies in both practical and thematic terms. In the process, such work invites audiences to think more probingly about their own status as digital humans, while also extending the reach of live performance in truly unprecedented ways. Although the cultural transformations that have come with widespread digitization still feel new to many, there is now a long history to the rise of computing technology. From the development of personal computers in the 1970s, to the building of algorithmic ‘Turing machines’ in the 1930s, to Charles Babbage’s plans for an ‘analytical engine’ in the 1840s, computer science is far from a twenty-first-century invention. What has changed decisively in recent years is the extraordinary rise in everyday computing—indeed, every-minute computing—that has occurred thanks to mobile phones. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf quipped about a palpable shift in sensibility that came with the dawn of modernism. ‘[O]n or about December 1910 human character changed’, she wrote. ‘All human relations have shifted … And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature’ (Woolf 1924: 4–5). Woolf was right, of course, about a major transformation taking place in society, and especially the way that society represented itself through art. Still, her ‘intentionally provocative statement’, so blithe in its observation of seismic change, was blatantly ‘hyperbolic in its pinpointing of a date’ (Mambrol 2016). There would be little provocative or hyperbolic, however, in saying that on or about June 2007, events were put in motion that would again transform human character and all that springs from it. This was the month that Apple debuted its first iPhone, a device that ushered in a new era in mainstream, human–computer relations. While earlier versions of smartphones existed before this date, and widespread use of them would not come for a few more years, the highly publicized release of the iPhone heralded a new phase in the popularization of mobile computing. Within a decade, 80–90% of people in highly developed countries, including most of Europe and North America, were walking around with continuous access to knowledge of the world—as well as unprecedented amounts of disinformation about it—courtesy of the phones in their pockets (Wigginton et al. 2017: 5; ‘Smartphone Penetration’ 2017). Such devices transformed what was once a located and intermittent experience—accessing the internet—and integrated it into literally every step

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of daily life. The way people interact with one another, the way they navigate the physical and intellectual world around them, and the way they understand what is real and what is not have all changed as a result. It’s not too much of a leap, then, to suggest that we as people have changed too. With such shifts in mind, this book focuses on digitally oriented performances of Shakespeare that emerged with the widespread digitization of everyday life in the 2010s and proliferated even more rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of that decade. While it does at times look further back, both to earlier digital advances and to the histories of other media, the question of what Shakespearean performance looks and feels like in an era of continuous, embodied computing remains its central concern. Of course, the nature of such digital Shakespeares varies significantly depending on where one looks, and one of the aims of this book is to illustrate just how wide-ranging this constantly evolving category of performance has proved to be. In this book, ‘digital performance’ refers to the staging of theatrical performance by overtly and self-consciously digital means: it includes within its remit live theatrical productions that are recorded and broadcasted digitally; other live theatrical work, staged for in-person audiences, that foregrounds digital technology through the use of real-time video feeds or dynamic, three-dimensional computer projections; and more adapted, born-digital works that engage principally with online audiences and present themselves in some way as theatre. As different as the productions across these three categories can be, they share a profound interest in the forms of presence, liveness, and immersion associated with theatre as an art form, as well as a preoccupation with how digital technologies can both disrupt and deepen these qualities. Throughout its analysis, this book attends to the interplay between the banal and the extraordinary when it comes to such digital technologies, and the way that the performance of Shakespeare in particular—a figure who, in cultural terms, also oscillates between over-familiarity and wondrousness—recalibrates audiences’ perceptions of digital tools and the states of being that they create. A device or effect that might be experienced as entirely naturalized in everyday life can take on new strangeness when presented through the frame of theatrical performance, particularly when those performances are based on plays as canonical, classical, and seemingly traditional as those of Shakespeare. By focusing on Shakespeare, the most-performed playwright in the Anglophone world and a very popular one beyond it, this book at once delimits its investigation

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to a manageable study and opens it up to a staggering range of digital experiments. As W. B. Worthen has suggested, ‘Shakespeare performance cannot be definitive of performance per se’, but it nevertheless ‘provides a powerful instrument for examining the intersection of dramatic writing, the institutions of theatre, and evolving ideologies of performance’ (2014: 1–2). The long history of Shakespeare in performance also helps throw into sharper relief the striking disparities and sometimes quieter continuities between theatre in a hyper-digital age and that which came before. At the same time, the insights yielded by such an analysis also work in the other direction, illuminating how different technologies can enable new ways of understanding and engaging with Shakespeare. The interactivity of many digital technologies can break down distinctions between performers and audiences, while the ability of the camera to look closely, to pause, and to replay can reshape experiences of character, story, and emotion. As is the case with all adaptations—and especially the most creative, intelligent, and daring ones—digital investigations of Shakespearean drama help illuminate the richness of these texts and the responses they inspire. The best digital performances of Shakespeare, this book argues, bring together a thoughtful exploration of the nature of live presence, a virtuosic demonstration of a technology’s affordances, and a deep, intelligent engagement with the Shakespearean text.

1.1

Hamlet Machines

‘As you read this it is safe to assume that someone, somewhere is performing Hamlet ’, Paul Prescott writes in his introduction to the play in performance. Among the places you might find the Danish prince, he suggests, are ‘a park, a village hall or a national theatre’—or, we might now add, on some form of screen (Prescott 2005: lix). In many ways, it is fitting that Hamlet should prove a particular favourite among Shakespeare’s digital adaptors, given the play’s interest in the scope, and limits, of human agency and ingenuity. It also features the first known instance in English of a person referring to himself as a ‘machine’, both in terms of his physical body and the powers of volition that attend it: ‘Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him’, Hamlet writes in his love letter to Ophelia, sometime before the events surrounding his father’s death mean that his life is no longer entirely his own (OED 2020: ‘machine, n.’, I.2; 2.2.123–4). The idea that people are engines of both

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nature and culture, and that their ability to thrive is bound up in each, is inherent to the play itself and its long production history. In the 1970s, the German theatre-maker Heiner Müller brought the mechanical dimensions of Shakespeare’s tragedy to the fore in his deconstructed and postmodern adaptation, Hamletmachine. But whereas Müller’s vision of the play had more to do with the metaphorical machines of society that strip their subjects of agency and fulfilment, later adaptors have been just as interested in the literal potential of Hamlet as a function of technology. Countless Hamlet s have now come to life through different forms of digitization, but for now I will focus on just three created in theatrical contexts: a blockbuster broadcast, an avant-garde installation, and an immersive film. In considering how these adaptations have approached the play and the critical responses they have inspired, I offer an introductory glimpse into the wide range of activity that falls within the remit of digital performance as it is understood in this book. At the same time, I illustrate the anxieties such work can provoke concerning the future of theatre, and indeed of Shakespeare: that it is overly commodified and commercial, that it drains the life out of a vital art, and that it pursues novelty at the cost of deep, transformative experience. In 2015, the Barbican Centre in London made history. Its production of Hamlet , starring Benedict Cumberbatch of first television and then Hollywood fame, had become the city’s fastest-selling theatrical event, with searches for it on one popular ticket website temporarily outstripping those for Beyoncé and Jay Z’s upcoming world tour (Stewart 2014). Even so, the biggest audience for this much-anticipated production, directed by Lyndsey Turner, would not be the 100,000 people lucky enough to see it live and in person in London (O’Brien 2014). Rather, it would be the quarter of a million viewers worldwide who would watch it filmed, edited, and relayed by digital means to cinema screens later that year, plus the many more who would access bootleg copies of it online—and, eventually, a legally streamable version—in the months and years that followed (Hawkes 2015). Although the live broadcasting of theatre to cinemas had by this time been around for several years, it was this production that confirmed just what a powerful cultural, artistic, and economic force this digitally enabled medium could be. In terms of box office receipts alone, the broadcast was an unprecedented success, due in large part to Cumberbatch’s global, social mediasupported fandom. By the end of the year it had taken £2.93 million in the UK, where it was screened in 87% of cinemas (Gardner 2015).

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In comparison, Justin Kurzel’s feature film of Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, earned £2.82 million in the UK during the same period of time (Hutchison 2015). For perhaps the first time since the earliest days of cinema, a theatre production of a Shakespearean play surpassed a critically successful, star-studded movie adaptation in terms of box office takings. While this was undoubtedly the most striking outcome of the broadcast for financially minded producers and programmers, for theatre-makers and their audiences an even more provocative idea was the possibility that, in artistic terms, the production worked better on a digitized screen than it did on the analogue stage. Beset by early reviews deeming it a less-than-stellar interpretation of Shakespeare’s great tragedy, this ‘CumberHamlet’, as it was dubbed on social media, received a more positive response once it made its way to the cinema. Whereas Michael Billington, The Guardian’s chief theatre critic at the time, found the production over-conceptualized and over-designed, his colleague Lyn Gardner found much to praise in the diversity, enthusiasm, and youthfulness of the cinema audience when she saw it (Billington 2015; Gardner 2015). Turning to the broadcast itself, Gardner further observed how the production—‘accused by several critics of being overly cinematic’ due to ‘its visual swagger’ and ‘indigo hues’— came ‘into its own on the screen’ (2015). A once-cavernous set now seemed purposely to dwarf ‘the inhabitants of Elsinore … as if personal feelings ha[d] become negated in chilly public spaces’, while the ‘internal struggles’ of Cumberbatch’s ‘infinitely touching’ prince could be clearly seen in detailed close ups on his face (ibid.). In many ways, Gardner indicated, the filmed version had surpassed its parent production by zooming in on and powerfully framing details in the performance that had gotten lost in the vast auditorium of the Barbican’s main stage. The idea that this Hamlet worked better as a broadcast than it did in person suggested a new phase in the relationship between live theatre and its digitized, global relay. Few critics failed to note the way Cumberbatch’s international fame—itself a product of screen drama and digital connectivity—gave the production a different charge than that typically associated with Shakespearean performance, not least when Cumberbatch made a widely circulated and somewhat paradoxical plea to his fans to stop filming the show themselves on their mobile phones (Brantley 2015; Simkins 2015). Mediation was central to this theatrical venture, but only on certain terms. Whether in the cinematic feel of the staging, or in the media-saturated excitement surrounding Cumberbatch himself, the

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experience of this production stretched well beyond the thousand people watching it at the Barbican every night. For devotees of the theatre, such a scenario seemed to threaten an already endangered art form by displacing the primacy and preciousness of in-person experience and offering a selection of distributable, corporatized, and celebrity-driven commodities in its place. The fact that the production ended up netting record profits, both at the Barbican and in cinemas, only fuelled concerns that commercial interests had overtaken a purer, more genuinely ‘live’ approach to theatre-making in this unusually high-profile project. In the discussions surrounding Turner’s Hamlet , one can see anxieties emerge about the future of theatre in an increasingly screen-based culture. At first glance, then, the second digitally rich Hamlet considered in this chapter offers something very different: a supremely live approach to performance, to small audiences on a limited number of dates, in which the script itself and everything that followed was different every night. And yet, this esoteric production still prompted questions about the way digital technology might empty the life, if not the actual liveness, out of theatrical performance. Two years before Cumberbatch’s Hamlet , for four days in December 2013, the Brooklyn Academy of Music hosted the final leg of an international tour of Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work: A Machine-Made Hamlet. At the heart of this experimental project, which brought together theatremakers and computer programmers, was an algorithm that parsed the text of Shakespeare’s tragedy in different ways every night (Cartelli 2016: 433). As the algorithm churned through the play, digitized voices read out the chosen textual fragments and the words themselves appeared on the stage’s black backdrop—a ‘looming computer screen’—in different fonts, sizes, and colours (‘Piece of Work’ 2013). Metadata linked to the words triggered music, sound, and lighting effects, and, in the case of the ghost’s appearance, released puffs of smoke from a raised platform on the floor (Fig. 1.1). During one of the show’s five acts, an actor entered and delivered lines from Hamlet selected by the algorithm and transmitted through an earpiece (in New York, Joan MacIntosh and Scott Shepherd alternated the role on successive nights), but otherwise live, human presence was markedly absent from this highly conceptual production. Instead, A Piece of Work’s most visible player was the text itself, constantly lighting up an otherwise bare stage and producing an experience that one spectator likened to ‘watch[ing] subtitles without an accompanying film’ (Levy 2014: 507).

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Fig. 1.1 A Piece of Work (2013), directed by Annie Dorsen (Photograph by Bruno Pocheron and reproduced courtesy of Annie Dorsen)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, responses to such a deconstructed and disembodied take on the play were mixed. Some theatre critics ‘rather liked’ the ‘shades of meaning, hints of ideas’ generated by the dispassionate and unpredictable cuts of the algorithm, which at times produced resonant lines like ‘To be and not to be, this is the sorrow’ (Kiley 2013). For Charles Isherwood of The New York Times, Dorsen’s ‘puckish riff’ created a freshness that helped restore audiences ‘to the state of excited disorientation we probably first felt when encountering the exotic syntax and language of Shakespeare’ (2013). In these instances, this digital remix of Hamlet estranged overly familiar spectators in productive ways, inviting them to find new meaning in an old and even ossified text. Dorsen would go on to win Guggenheim and MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowships for her algorithm-based work, which jurists praised for the way it ‘challeng[ed] the definition of a theatrical event’ (‘Annie Dorsen’ 2019). For the less enthusiastic, however, A Piece of Work’s heavy reliance on computer intervention produced effects that were more enervating than enlightening. Some reviewers complained of the loss of narrative and even linguistic sense that came with listening to synthetic voices, full of ‘metallic tang’, discharge a ‘word salad’ of ‘total gibberish’ for the better part of an hour (Isherwood 2013; Kiley 2013). Others described how the

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lack of live human actors produced a ‘bloodless’ form of theatre that was more interesting in theory than in practice (Kiley 2013; Cartelli 2016: 456). Of central concern was what happens to Hamlet when the humans are gone. In a play so fixated on questions of agency, action, and emotion, what do we get when we ‘ru[n] the show with no human intervention’, Dorsen asked, and let machines take over instead (Kiley 2013)? The answer for some spectators was something that was not theatre. Reflecting on her experience of watching the production twice, Jemma Alix Levy argued that theatre as an art form ‘requires life’ to truly ‘live’ (2014: 506). ‘As often as we hear the assurance that “the text is alive”’, she continued, ‘the production proved that the phrase is only a metaphor’ (ibid.). Without sustained human presence, Levy and others found the project’s ‘terse reductivism’ limiting not only in terms of Shakespeare’s text but also in terms of its potential for emotional and intellectual impact (Isherwood 2013). Theatre, such critiques suggest, needs live actors to create drama through bodies as well as words. From this perspective, overly digitized approaches to theatrical performance undermine the fundamental value of embodied presence and the affective meaning it generates. If the influence of digital technology made Turner and Cumberbatch’s theatrical audiences feel secondary, and Dorsen’s audiences feel disaffected, then this Introduction’s third Hamlet —an immersive, 360degree film released in 2019—attempted to side-step such frustrations by locating spectators at the centre of Elsinore’s human drama. Directed by Steven Maler, and produced by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company in Boston in collaboration with Google, Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit used interactive film technology to create an hour-long, virtual reality (VR) experience of the play. The project’s aims, according to Maler, were both to ‘democratize Shakespeare and theater’ and to explore digital technology’s ability to make audiences feel like they are ‘right there in the room’—not just with the actors, but also with the characters whose lives they inhabit (Harris 2019). In this production, released for free on YouTube, audience members used a smartphone and a VR headset (whether a high-tech model or an inexpensive, cardboard version) to transport themselves to a threedimensional performance in-the-round. Once inside the virtual playing space, spectators could look in all directions at a vast but now decaying art deco theatre, cluttered with dilapidated objects including a clawfooted bathtub, a four-poster bed, dozens of glowing lamps, crimson

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rugs, discarded children’s toys, and a broken-down car (see Chapter 5, Fig. 5.4). All the scenes in Maler’s heavily cut and remixed Hamlet unfolded in this moody, darkened landscape, with new action popping up in different parts of the room and requiring spectators to turn their heads and sometimes the rest of their bodies in order to follow what was happening. Though they could not actually walk through and interact with the set, audiences were free to look wherever they wanted and experience the story from the perspective of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. The creative team hoped that locating the viewer within the performance would give them ‘a sense of agency and urgency as omniscient observer, guide and participant’ (‘Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit ’ 2019). After six weeks on YouTube, Hamlet 360 had generated more than 30,000 views, though how many of those clicks involved watching the production in full and how many took the form of a curious glance remains unknown. Comments from YouTube audiences ranged from the ecstatic (‘That was incredible!’), to the impressed (‘A solidly engaging hour of ground-breaking VR theatre’), to the sceptical (‘VR is not ready’), to the sneering (‘The video quality was so bad I thought I was playing Minecraft for the first 10 minutes’) (ibid.). The fact that this hybrid production was filmed and its ‘run’ took place entirely online meant that few professional theatre critics reviewed it, though Don Aucoin of The Boston Globe celebrated the way this Hamlet allowed him to feel ‘the prince’s psychological suffering … in a way that was more immediate, visceral, and inescapable than if I’d been watching a movie, or even a live production if I had a bad seat’ (2019). Aucoin clearly enjoyed Hamlet 360’s innovations, but that final caveat—‘if I had a bad seat’—betrayed a sense that as interesting as this online endeavour might have been, it still came second to live theatre at its best. Other commentators were less circumspect in their criticism, suggesting that the project was ‘pure fad’ and ‘a tech demo’ that ‘privilege[d] digital effects over the truly immersive, full experience’ of Shakespeare’s language (‘Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit ’ 2019; Jones 2019). At issue was the question of whether digital tools were being used more for the sake of novelty than in the service of deep engagement with the text. ‘At just 61 minutes, this “Hamlet” is both extremely long by the standards of virtual reality and extremely short by the standards of “Hamlet”’, wrote The New York Times ’s Elizabeth A. Harris, and this curtailed running time raised doubts among some theatre-goers as to whether the project could prove much more than an attention-catching gimmick

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(2019). In such cases, the idea of digital experimentation seemed to signal something thin and most likely trivial, offering a useful first encounter with a work of art, perhaps, but rarely showcasing its full richness. Through these three very different Hamlet s, and audiences’ reactions to them, the wide range of theatrical work that digital technology has enabled in recent years starts to become visible. In some instances, that technology has had more to do with modes of transmission, as in the digital relay of Cumberbatch’s live performance, while in others it has involved the staging of digital computing or digital environments, as in Dorsen’s algorithmic theatre and Maler’s first-person-player stage space. In each case, one can observe new approaches to theatrical performance that are at once continuous with and disruptive of more traditional, physically located, live drama. For while all three of the productions aimed, in some way, to extend theatrical experience, either to new audiences or to new depths, they also prompted claims that they were not really theatre, or, worse, that they threatened the survival of theatre in its most potent form. The fact that they were based on Shakespeare’s plays intensified a sense of unease, with many critics worrying that audiences would not receive appropriate exposure to the playwright’s work through such adapted, mediated renditions. From these more disdainful responses comes a summary of the worries digital technology has often provoked in terms of Shakespearean performance: that it is too commercial, too cold, and too frivolous.

1.2

Brave New Worlds

The question, then, is why bother studying it any further? First and foremost, there is the promise of widened access. Digital technologies have the potential to dramatically expand audiences’ access to theatre, and in doing so to help make the art form more inclusive. The National Theatre’s NT Live project, which has been broadcasting since 2009 and included the Cumberbatch Hamlet , transmitted to 2,500 venues around the world by 2020, while the boom in online streaming as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic the same year extended audience reach even further (‘About Us’ 2020; Akbar 2020). Born-digital theatre projects, in turn, have the potential to intersect with vast social media followings and reach an extraordinary number of people. In the case of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Google+’s 2013 Midsummer Night’s Dreaming , an

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online project explored in Chapter 5, over 25 million spectators interacted with it in some way (Moffat 2013: 3). The significance of such numbers is, of course, a matter of interpretation. Research into cinema broadcasts, for instance, has suggested that the socioeconomic diversity of spectators is not as broad as might be hoped, though online streams have been more successful in reaching genuinely new audiences (Barker 2013: 28; ‘From Live-to-Digital’ 2016: 30–2). One might also question the emotional and aesthetic impact of seeing a flash of theatrical activity on a platform like Twitter or the now-defunct Google+ versus watching a full-length, more traditional production. Finally, access to digital devices and internet connectivity is hugely uneven both across communities and within them. Still, there is no denying that the use of digital technology to distribute theatrical performance creates new possibilities as to who might watch it, and accordingly who might be entertained, moved, and even transformed by it. Second, there is the reality of an ever-more digitized world surrounding the theatre. There is little question that digital approaches to creating and disseminating culture and art, including theatrical performance, will only become more prevalent in the coming years—a fact made overwhelmingly apparent by the impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Even before that, however, arts funding bodies in the UK had been steadily increasing the importance they placed on digital activity when awarding their grants. In 2017, the British government signalled this emphasis in a particularly explicit way when it changed the name of its Department for Culture, Media, and Sport to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. The following year, the newly retitled body issued a policy paper called ‘Cultural Is Digital’, in which it described the ‘UK technology and culture sectors’ as ‘the ultimate power couple’ (‘Culture Is Digital’ 2019: 5). This move towards a more digitally oriented culture sector can be attributed to both the potential for new technologies to increase access to publicly subsidized work, as discussed above, and the undeniably central role such technologies play in twenty-first-century life. The internet is a lifeline that connects families, friends, colleagues, and all different forms of support services to one another, even as it is a scourge that enables the circulation of harmful misinformation, bilious hatred, and crushing insecurities. Even for those who work hard to keep their lives offline, there is no avoiding the influential presence of digital culture altogether. Those

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who continue to read physical newspapers, for instance, engage with journalism that has had to adjust its working practices to survive in an online context, while those who choose not to create accounts with social media platforms will still have friends, co-workers, children, and other loved ones whose lives are shaped, at times profoundly, by them. For most of the world’s citizens, opting out entirely is no longer a choice—though enduring inequalities in terms of digital access mean that modes of opting in still vary widely. For some people, the theatre has represented a refuge from this digitization of everyday life, a point to which I return in Chapter 2. But if artists and audiences want a theatre landscape that remains as accessible, pertinent, and thought-provoking to as wide a range of people as possible, then it must be one that acknowledges, at least some of the time, the huge impact of digital connectivity on contemporary society. Such an acknowledgement involves the use of technology to disseminate productions and to shape their creation, both in conceptual and in material terms. Theatre, like so much art, helps its audiences think through experiences and problems that shape their lives: it holds ‘the mirror up to nature’, inviting viewers to consider ‘the very age and body of the time’ of which they are a part (Hamlet , 3.2.22–4). There is no excluding digital technology from such a formulation. Artists and audiences need theatre to explore the capabilities and consequences of digital tools so that they can better understand what these technologies are doing both for and to them. Third, and finally, there is the value of exploring the uncomfortable. The fact that so many artists and audiences have seen the encroachment of digital technology within theatrical performance as so vexing suggests— admittedly paradoxically—that it is all the more urgent that it be studied. Anything that makes people so nervous about something they love is doing useful work in terms of getting to the heart of what they cherish about that thing and what they hope to achieve through it. In the case of theatre, these prized qualities very often include the experience of shared presence, liveness, and mental and bodily immersion. Throughout this book, I will argue that digital approaches to theatre do not dispose of such phenomena but rather revise them. Studying whether and how such revisions work gives us a richer understanding of these precious states of being, which, I contend, are not fixed and universal but relational, evolving, and deeply subjective. Ultimately, then, this book is about the nature of theatre and what we can learn about our own digitized lives through it.

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Chapter 2 explores the key theoretical concepts that underpin debates about what theatre, performance, and ‘the digital’ are, focusing in particular on notions of presence, liveness, immersion, and embodiment. The chapter traces how scholars and practitioners have often pitted theatrical and digital experience against one another, before going on to make a case for their many points of convergence. Given how digital tools offer users new ways to be present with, performing for, connected to, and immersed in the lives of others, the chapter argues that digitally intensive forms of theatre-making can in fact take us deeper into our understanding of the nature of performance, rather than further away from it. Chapters 3–5 move into production-based, Shakespeare-focused explorations of these theoretical issues, with each chapter considering a particular category of digital performance: broadcasts and recordings of live stage productions, created for viewing on screens; ‘intermedial’ stage productions that draw on digital technology, most often live film, as a central part of their dramaturgy; and borndigital theatrical experiments, such as social media, VR, and videoconferencing adaptations, that make the internet into a new kind of stage. Each chapter begins with a reflection on the longer history of these modes of theatre-making, from nineteenth-century théâtrophones to mid-twentieth-century multimedial productions to early twenty-firstcentury videogames. These opening accounts provide historical context for the creative initiatives that have emerged since the explosion of digital connectivity in the twenty-first century. In many cases, they illustrate long-standing continuities between past and present, particularly in terms of the desire to make Shakespearean performance as accessible, communal, spectacular, and participatory as possible. At the same time, these historical reflections draw attention to the enormous step-changes that digital tools have enabled when it comes to what is technically possible and financially viable in the theatre. The remainder of each chapter considers at least half a dozen, sometimes more, examples of Shakespearean productions that illustrate the experiential, aesthetic, and ethical opportunities and risks that these categories of digital performance activate. From more intimate modes of spectating that at once intensify emotion and disrupt experiences of theatrical space, to spectacular visual displays that simultaneously dazzle and estrange, to participatory modes of performance that blur the boundaries between real and fictional life, these chapters chart the practical experiments that twenty-first-century theatre-makers have undertaken through the use of digital tools. At the same time, they reflect on the

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implications of such experiments not only for theatre as an art form but also for us—audiences, performers, scholars, and critics—as people living in a world fundamentally shaped by digital technology and the kinds of behaviours it inculcates. Chapter 6 and the final interviews reflect on Shakespearean digital theatre-making in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated many of the trends already in motion in the decade before it. Looking at three pandemic-era performances of Shakespeare, Chapter 6 argues for the importance of multi-platform convergence, thoughtful hybridity, and a sense of interactive presence to digital theatre in the future. It also celebrates experimental risk-taking, even when it yields results that some might interpret as failure. The closing interviews with John Wyver, a prolific producer of filmed theatre and live broadcasts, and Zoë Seaton, an adventurous theatre-maker and director of online Shakespeare productions during the pandemic, reflect on the continuities and differences that can be traced across the past, present, and possible futures of digital performance. Both position digital technology as a powerful tool for the creation and distribution of theatre, while also holding fast to long-held theatrical values including liveness, co-presence, imaginative co-creation, and immersion. This is not the first book, of course, to explore the impact of digital technology on Shakespearean performance. Pascale Aebischer, Martin Barker, and John Wyver have written extensively about the rise of live theatre broadcasting, of both Shakespeare and the performing arts more broadly. Thomas Cartelli, Aneta Mancewicz, and W. B. Worthen have, in turn, offered probing explorations of the use of digital media within the context of in-person and often highly experimental stage productions of Shakespeare’s plays. Gina Bloom, Rebecca Bushnell, and Stephen O’Neill have examined the crossroads between theatrical performance, social media, and digital gaming, drawing attention to the new kinds of communal and participatory stages that they create. In cutting across all three categories, this book attempts to bring together an aesthetically very disparate, but technically and conceptually highly related, genre of theatrical activity that it calls ‘digital performance’. Once again, it is not alone in such efforts: Pascale Aebischer’s Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of Performance (2020) and W. B. Worthen’s Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre (2020) both examine work from at least two of these categories, while also venturing into areas of analogue technology and recorded performance not included in

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this study. But whereas Aebischer’s book focuses on the ethical dilemmas different technologies create for audiences within the context of theatrical spectatorship, and Worthen’s on how new technologies reveal the fundamentally ‘technical’ status of all aspects of theatrical performance, long before the rise of binary code, this book is centrally concerned with what digitally inflected performance can reveal to us about the experience of presence, community, attention, and emotion—in a word, life—in our own digitized era. In this sense, it is at least as much about us as digital humans as it is about theatre or Shakespeare. What theatre and Shakespeare bring to this very big question about how humans are evolving in relation to digital technology is the helpful foregrounding of what it means to be present, with oneself, with others, and with a work of art. The way many people pay attention has changed dramatically with mobile computing and digital media’s extraordinary power to distract and engage, connect and isolate, instruct and mislead. Both the intrinsic artistic richness of Shakespeare’s texts and the extrinsic cultural value that has amassed around them mean that digitally intensive productions of these plays are especially prevalent, diverse, provocative, and striking. Looking at what theatre-makers do with Shakespeare and modern technology, I contend, is a helpfully cohesive and unexpectedly penetrating way of exploring the impact of digital culture on life as we currently know it. All the productions discussed in this book reveal something important about how digital technologies are reshaping that life and the meaning of performance within it. The most dazzling do so in ways that reassert the power of co-presence while simultaneously reinventing what it means to experience Shakespeare as theatre.

Productions Consulted Dorsen, Annie (2013) A Piece of Work, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York City, 21 December, video excerpts on Vimeo, https://vimeo.com/user93 02488 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Maler, Steven (2019) Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, starring Jack CutmoreScott, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company in collaboration with Google, YouTube [accessed with Google Cardboard, Oculus Go, and Oculus Rift], 24 January, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc88G7nkV-Q [accessed 15 February 2022]. Turner, Lyndsey (2015) Hamlet broadcast, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, directed for screen by Robin Lough for NT Live, Barbican Theatre, London,

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and Stratford-upon-Avon Picturehouse, 15 October [subsequently accessed through National Theatre Archive, London, RNT/D/1/1/43].

Works Cited ‘About Us’ (2020) National Theatre Live, http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/ about-us [accessed 15 August 2020]. Aebischer, Pascale (2020) Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Akbar, Arifa (2020) ‘The Next Act: How the Pandemic Is Shaping Online Theatre’s Future’, The Guardian, 21 September, https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2020/sep/21/future-of-live-theatre-online-drama-coronaviruslockdown [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Annie Dorsen’ (2019) MacArthur Foundation, https://www.macfound.org/fel lows/class-of-2019/annie-dorsen [accessed 15 February 2022]. Aucoin, Don (2019) ‘All the Virtual World’s a Stage in Hamlet 360’, The Boston Globe, 24 January, https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2019/01/24/allvirtual-world-stage-hamlet/xpMd7Kjqh4wCCLPXbASxdJ/story.html#com ments [accessed 15 February 2022]. Barker, Martin (2013) Live to Your Local Cinema: The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Billington, Michael (2015) ‘Hamlet Review—Cumberbatch Imprisoned in a Dismal Production’, The Guardian, 26 August, https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2015/aug/25/hamlet-barbican-review-benedict-cumberbatchimprisoned-prince [accessed 15 February 2022]. Bloom, Gina (2018) Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of the English Commercial Theater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Brantley, Ben (2015) ‘Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet ’, The New York Times, 25 August, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/theater/review-ben edict-cumberbatch-in-hamlet-cocooned-in-an-aura-on-a-london-stage.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Bushnell, Rebecca W. (2016) Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames: The Future in the Instant, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Cartelli, Thomas (2016) ‘Essentializing Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath: Dmitry Krymov’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It), Matías Piñeiro’s Viola, and Annie Dorsen’s Piece of Work: A Machine-Made Hamlet ’, Shakespeare Quarterly 67:4, 431–56. Cartelli, Thomas (2019) Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath: The Intermedial Turn and Turn to Embodiment, New York: Palgrave. ‘Culture Is Digital’ (2019) Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport, 18 September, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl oads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/687519/TT_v4.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022].

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‘From Live-to-Digital: Understanding the Impact of Digital Developments in Theatre on Audiences, Production, and Distribution’ (2016) Arts Council England, 11 October, https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/ download-file/From_Live_to_Digital_OCT2016.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. Gardner, Lyn (2015) ‘Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet Comes into Its Own on Screen’, The Guardian, 16 October, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/ theatreblog/2015/oct/16/benedict-cumberbatch-hamlet-nt-live-barbican [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit —Shakespeare in VR’ (2019) YouTube, 24 January, https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Jc88G7nkV-Q [accessed 15 February 2022]. Harris, Elizabeth A. (2019) ‘Hamlet in Virtual Reality Casts the Viewer in the Play’, The New York Times, 25 January, https://www.nytimes. com/2019/01/25/theater/hamlet-virtual-reality-google.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Hawkes, Rebecca (2015) ‘Live Broadcast of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet Watched by 225,000 People’, The Telegraph, 21 October, https://www. telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/benedict-cumberbatch-hamlet-live/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Hutchison, David (2015) ‘Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet Takes £3m at NT Live Box Office’, The Stage, 9 December, https://www.thestage.co.uk/ news/benedict-cumberbatch-hamlet-takes-3m-at-nt-live-box-office [accessed 15 February 2022]. Isherwood, Charles (2013) ‘There Be Madness in This Method’, The New York Times, 19 December, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/theater/rev iews/a-piece-of-work-a-computerized-hamlet-mash-up-at-bam.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Jones, Josh (2019) ‘Watch a New Virtual Reality Production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet ’, Open Culture, 29 January, http://www.openculture.com/2019/ 01/watch-a-new-virtual-reality-production-of-shakespeares-hamlet.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Kiley, Brendan (2013) ‘Sound and Fury: The Controversy over A Piece of Work at On the Boards’, The Stranger, 25 February, https://www.thestranger. com/slog/archives/2013/02/25/sound-and-fury-the-controversy-over-apiece-of-work-at-on-the-boards [accessed 15 February 2022]. Levy, Jemma Alix (2014) ‘Review of A Piece of Work’, Shakespeare Bulletin 32:3, 506–9. Mambrol, Nasrullah (2016) ‘Modernism’, Literariness, 25 March, https://lit erariness.org/2016/03/25/on-or-about-december-1910-human-nature-cha nged/ [accessed 15 February 2022].

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Mancewicz, Aneta (2014) Intermedial Shakespeares on European Stages, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Moffat, Katie (2013) ‘How the RSC Used Google+ to Run a Bold Experiment in Digital Theatre’, CultureHive, https://www.culturehive.co.uk/wp-con tent/uploads/2013/10/Using-Google-to-run-a-bold-experiment-in-digitaltheatre1.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. O’Neill, Stephen (2014) Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard, London: Bloomsbury. ‘A Piece of Work’ (2013) Brooklyn Academy of Music, https://www.bam.org/ theater/2013/pieceofwork [accessed 15 February 2022]. Prescott, Paul (2005) ‘The Play in Performance’, in Alan Sinfield (ed) William Shakespeare, Hamlet, London: Penguin Books, lix–lxxi. O’Brien, Daniel (2014) ‘Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet at Barbican Sells Out in Record Time’, Evening Standard, 11 August, https://www.standard. co.uk/go/london/theatre/hamlet-at-the-barbican-benedict-cumberbatch-eff ect-sees-play-become-most-in-demand-theatre-event-9662839.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. OED (Oxford English Dictionary) (2020) Oxford: Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Simkins, Michael (2015) ‘Alas Poor Benedict! Fans Filming Isn’t the Only Peril That Could Throw Cumberbatch’, The Guardian, 10 August, https://www. theguardian.com/culture/2015/aug/10/benedict-cumberbatch-hamlet-bar bican-fans [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Smartphone Penetration to Reach 66% in 2018’ (2017) Zenith, 16 October, https://www.zenithmedia.com/smartphone-penetration-reach-662018/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Stewart, Rachel (2014) ‘Cumberbatch’s Hamlet Most In-Demand Show of All Time’, The Telegraph, 11 August, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ theatre/theatre-news/11025625/Cumberbatchs-Hamlet-most-in-demandshow-of-all-time.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Wigginton, Craig, et al. (2017) ‘Global Mobile Consumer Trends’, Deloitte, https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/techno logy-media-telecommunications/us-global-mobile-consumer-survey-secondedition.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. Woolf, Virginia (1924) Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, London: Hogarth Press. Worthen, W. B. (2014) Shakespeare Performance Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worthen, W. B. (2020) Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wyver, John (2019) Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History, London: Bloomsbury.

CHAPTER 2

Being There

In March 2011, the McKittrick Hotel opened its doors to visitors.1 Behind an inconspicuous warehouse façade in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, guests discovered a sprawling network of dimly lit, 1930s-inspired rooms across six floors. Here they could piece together the story of Macbeth, laced with details from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, amid the swirling, almost-wordless scenes of performance that materialized around them. This was Punchdrunk’s SleepNo More, one of the most famous and commercially successful productions of Shakespeare this century, and a catalyst for the surge in large-scale, immersive theatre projects that would follow over the next decade. The appeal of Sleep No More—which more than a decade later is still running in New York and Shanghai, where a sister production opened in 2016—is manifold.2 Its meticulously detailed sets, dance translation, non-linear storytelling, and noir aesthetic have captivated audiences, while its emphasis on intimate, interactive, and often eroticized presence has thrilled them. Free to roam the massive space as they please, so long as they remain silent and keep their Venetian-style masks on, spectators can physically enter the world of the drama and intermingle with its characters. Depending on the route they take, this could involve chasing a blood-soaked Macbeth up flights of stairs, peering illicitly at Lady Macbeth in her bathtub, witnessing a strobe-lit gathering of semi-clothed

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witches, or stumbling into a cavernous ballroom alive with music and dance. Alongside such mesmerizing experiences, a handful of spectators also find themselves privy to special one-on-one encounters, in which a performer singles them out for a private exchange, be it a tender kiss on the forehead, the telling of a story, or the bestowal of a gift, usually accompanied by the delicate removal of their mask. For the theatre critic Sarah Hemming, such tactile, engrossing experiences offer audiences ‘a visceral alternative to the quick-fix, touch screen interaction of our technology-heavy world’, and Felix Barrett, Punchdrunk’s Artistic Director, has agreed (2013). ‘[I]t’s real: you’re not interacting with a pixel’, he remarked in an interview with Hemming about his company’s work. ‘You’re there in the space, you’re active, you’re part of it… It’s all about presence’ (ibid.). Such an intense focus on, and even obsession with, the heady power of bodily presence exemplifies the essence of theatrical performance as it has often been understood: actors and audiences physically together, in both time and place, sharing stories that have the potential to move, overwhelm, and transform. This perhaps makes Sleep No More an odd place to start in a book interested in digital approaches to performance, which frequently dislocate their audiences in some way from immediate, embodied experience. But as rooted as Punchdrunk’s production is in the physical here and now, it also owes a debt to digital culture that many people, including Barrett, have acknowledged. Its ambient, drone-heavy soundscape and myriad, atmospheric rooms have reminded visitors of videogames such as Bioshock and Resident Evil, while the show’s time-loop structure, which involves each character performing the same one-hour sequence three times in a row over the course of the evening, reveals a routinized, game-like logic at its core (Grant 2011; Cartelli 2013; Herzog 2013; Judge 2019). As word spread about Sleep No More in the early 2010s and its fan community grew, blogs, social media posts, and news articles began appearing with tips about how to ‘play’ this immersive world, spot its ‘Easter eggs’, and ‘win’ its highly prized one-on-ones (Schreier 2011; ‘Search and the Tail’ 2012; Cartelli 2013: 5). One technology blogger went as far as to dub it the ‘Game of the Year’: it is ‘the closest thing to a real life video game I’ve ever found’, he wrote, ‘and perhaps ever will’ (Dickinson 2011). The fact that Sleep No More could simultaneously be seen as the antidote to digital culture and the living embodiment of it reveals something

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fundamental about the nature of presence: that it is more about the experience of sustained, engrossing connection with people and environments, near and far, than it is about being physically located in a specific place and time. Although we have long associated the idea of presence with being together in the same room, over the past two decades digital platforms have increasingly facilitated forms of ‘being there’—with others, with works of art, with real and imagined places—that do not necessarily require geographic and temporal alignment. Videogames offer a particularly powerful example: many players find themselves lost in their detailed, absorbing, and often highly social worlds for hours at a time, riveted by a potent sense of being there in mental, emotional, and sometimes even physical ways. The fact that the digitally inflected experiences of Sleep No More have evoked such feelings among audience members says at least as much about the gripping forms of presence created in virtual environments as it does about those produced in the theatre. This chapter explores the common ground, in theoretical terms, between theatrical performance and digital culture, even as it acknowledges the many ways in which the two have been understood as distinct and even antithetical. It begins by considering the central role presence plays in many influential definitions of performance, before turning its attention to the ways in which digital experience has challenged a conception of presence that is solely predicated on physical togetherness—the so-called real, as opposed to the often-denigrated ‘virtual’. By arguing for a fluid rather than binary relationship between in-person and online states of being, I posit that there is no inherent contradiction in the idea of digitized theatrical performance, though its affordances and limitations beg further investigation. The chapter then goes on to consider two additional concepts that often surface in discussions of theatrical performance and digital culture: liveness and immersion. In both cases, I explore historical applications of these terms before considering how technological developments this century have recalibrated their range of meaning. At stake in debates about both phenomena, I suggest, is the untangling of how theatre works as an art form and the ways that digital technologies can both stymy and further its aims. The quest for liveness, I argue, is above all about the experience of a-liveness, while desires for immersion are about reclaiming a self that is embodied as well as intellectual. Such qualities are fundamental to theatrical performance in its most potent and arresting form, even as the technologies that can help make them more visible seem,

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at times, to threaten theatre’s integrity and viability. This chapter, and indeed this book, are about such apparent contradictions, and the unexpected points of convergence that arise when one considers them more deeply.

2.1

Performing Presence

When pushed to define what ‘theatre’ is, and how it is distinct from other kinds of dramatic performance such as film and television, most people will say something about how it occurs in the present, in person, producing a live exchange of energy between actors and audiences. The director Peter Brook famously defined the art form as a coming together of people: ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged’ (1968: 9). Understood in this way, theatre at its heart is a transaction of presence. Although it has also often involved the telling of a story in an architectural space called a ‘theatre’, for Brook and many others such elements are ultimately expendable. What cannot be done without is co-present togetherness, brought into a heightened state through mutual attentiveness, focus, and, hopefully, transformation. At first glance, such a definition leaves little room for digital mediation in the theatre or its more generalized analogue, ‘performance’—something Mark Fortier has described as ‘the notion of theatre in its entirety’, including the script, acting, lighting, music, audience response, and anything else that is part of the event (2016: 15). For Peggy Phelan, performance in its truest, purest form is fundamentally defined by its ephemerality and irreproducibility: ‘Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance’ (1996: 146). To create a digital copy of a stage performance, then, is to create a new and manifestly different work. Likewise, to create theatre that is ‘born digital’—that exists online, is experienced through a screen, and by default can be replayed—is to produce something that might be like performance, and yet is not exactly it. Performance in this sense is something that is both broad and specific. It encompasses all varieties of live, embodied, co-present interactions—including what has sometimes

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been known as ‘the performance of everyday life’—but it excludes that which can be fully apprehended through recording, reproduction, or any other form of mediation (Goffman 1959; Schechner 1990). It is a fundamentally live art, predicated on the impermanent experience of being there. But what about film and television, which are also dramatic works containing the performances of actors? For theorists such as Phelan, these media are more like written texts in that they are fixed, reviewable objects as opposed to changeable, ephemeral events. They might contain performances, but those once-live events have long been transformed into something else through remediation, a concept that Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin have famously defined as ‘the representation of one medium in another’ (2000: 45). Even the act of describing a performance begins to turn it into something else: ‘To attempt to write about the undocumentable event of performance’, Phelan argues, ‘is to invoke the rules of the written document and thereby alter the event itself’ (1996: 148). This does not mean that she and others necessarily oppose writing about or recording performance, but rather that they see the introduction of such media as something that ‘fundamentally alters the event’ and, in doing so, creates different art forms and experiences (ibid.). ‘Such media’ would certainly appear to encompass digital technology, which has given rise to countless modes of recording, remediating, and relaying live experience. Even more significant are the ways in which these technologies have come to constitute live and indeed lived experience itself—that is, they not only record experience at second-hand, but they also create it in its primary form. Examples from everyday life include dating, learning a new hobby, or catching up with family and friends, experiences that have all been affected in profound ways by the spread of platforms like YouTube, Tinder, TikTok, FaceTime, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and, quite simply, email. While many people still make a distinction between doing things ‘in real life’ versus doing them ‘virtually’, Nathan Jurgenson has argued that this desire ‘to see the digital and the physical as separate’—something he calls ‘digital dualism’—is in fact ‘a fallacy’ (2011). For him, the constant interpenetration of online and offline life has resulted in one single reality that is ‘both technological and organic, both digital and physical, all at once. We are not crossing in and out of separate digital and physical realities … but instead live one reality, one that is augmented by atoms and bits’ (ibid.).

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What might such a blended, ‘augmented’ existence mean for understandings of performance and its predication on presence? If theatrical performance, as Fortier suggests, ‘has come to stand for an intimate and largely non-technological art-making’, then what happens when the physical and the digital become so intermingled as to no longer be divisible from one another (2016: 29)? At one end of the debate, such a situation has been taken as a worrying indication that performance is under threat. With live, embodied presence increasingly giving way to digitally mediated ways of being, Phelan’s requirement that performance involves ‘living bodies’ that resist ‘the laws of the reproductive economy’ seems difficult to protect (1996: 146, 148). From this perspective, fleshy, live presence is at risk of being usurped—and perhaps even eradicated—by a growing reliance on technologically enabled, corporeally ‘unpresent’ kinds of existence. Such a view has led some theorists and practitioners to position digital technology as inherently antagonistic to true performance and the kind of theatre it creates. ‘Live interaction, genuine intimacy, real presence, and bodily expression are all exactly what the digital lacks’, Bill Blake has written, and for the most sceptical such qualities signal a fundamental impasse between the values of theatrical performance and the realities of digitized experience (2014: 4). To allow the digital to permeate performance would be to risk the destruction of theatre itself. The playwright Ayad Akhtar has taken this argument further, suggesting that live, copresent theatre—‘A living being before a living audience’—is in fact one of modern society’s last defences against our own destruction, which he believes is taking place through a widespread, neoliberal drive towards ‘digital dehumanization’ (2017). Seen in this way, performance and the digital seem inherently, irreconcilably at odds with one another. But it’s worth pausing to consider what exactly people mean when they talk about ‘the digital’, a phrase that Blake has characterized as ‘a completely unspecific concept that nonetheless—or therefore—gives the sense of the particularly momentous’ (2014: 5). He goes as far as to avoid defining it altogether, given how various, context-driven, and loaded its meanings can be. ‘Now that an average medium-scale production of Oklahoma! employs more computing power than sent a rocket to the Moon, it is fair to say that “the digital” is so embedded as to become invisible’, Matt Adams, co-founder of the experimental theatre company Blast Theory, writes in the Forward to Blake’s book (ibid.: viii). Digital technology is everywhere in modern,

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industrialized society, powering televisions and radios; controlling cars, thermostats, and washing machines; and lighting and providing sound for the most seemingly traditional theatrical events. In this sense, almost everything people create is shaped by the digital, potentially rendering the term so broad as to become meaningless. In the context of debates about presence, performance, and technology, however—and consequently in the context of this book—the concept of the digital refers as much to the human states of being produced in relation to computer technologies as to the functional reality of the technologies themselves. This is not to underplay the significance of the latter, of course, nor to suggest that it is unconnected to the former. The reality of those technologies—what they can do, how they are adopted, the extent of their reach—directly shapes the human experience and conceptualization of digitized life. But a more people-focused, experiential understanding of the digital means that this concept constantly evolves in relation to the technologies themselves, with once-novel innovations powerfully influencing popular perceptions of digital ways of being before eventually becoming so familiar as to no longer register. To refer back to Adams, at a certain point technologies become so naturalized as to be rendered invisible, simply merging into notions of the thing itself. Just as there has long been no need to speak of ‘electric’ lights, there is increasingly little distinction to be made in referring to a ‘digital’ camera. Likewise, while people still use DVDs to watch films—at least for now—few would be able to tell you that their name originally comes from the longer title, ‘digital video discs’. In such cases, the exceptionality and indeed wonder of these technologies have faded from view, producing a state of normalization that Zara Dinnen has called ‘the digital banal’ (2018: 1). Such examples suggest that digital experience is as much a human phenomenon as it is a technological one. Across such a broad and elastic conceptualization of the digital, one thing typically remains constant: a preoccupation with the kinds of presence that different technologies can enable and disable. Such a focus is clear in Jurgenson’s critique of digital dualism and his proposal of ‘augmented reality’ as a more useful concept, which for him offers a more accurate model of presence in a world where ‘the digital and physical are increasingly meshed’ (2011). It is telling that Jurgenson ends up leaving behind the word ‘digital’ in his call for a more unified understanding of plugged-in existence: perhaps in order to fully shed this false binary

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between digital virtuality and physical realness, one must jettison the very language of the digital and its long-held associations with the artificial, the disembodied, and the simulated. And yet, for the time being at least, the digital as an idea, a discourse, and a way of being persists in powerful and far-reaching ways. Such a situation is not altogether at odds with an understanding of digital forms of existence as continuous with physical ones. After all, in its oldest sense, the ‘digital’ refers to something ‘of or relating to the finger’, also known as a ‘digit’ (OED 2020: ‘digital, n. and adj.’, B.II.6). While the specific digits that gave rise to digital computing were the series of ones and zeros that made up strands of binary code, those numbers—so named because of their ability to be counted out on the fingers, up to ten—help establish a conceptual bridge between embodied human beings and the computing technologies they create. The digital, in its originating sense, is fundamentally linked to the capabilities of the body and mind, even if in its modern applications it can seem forbiddingly abstract and at times even inhuman. The same might be said of ‘technology’, a word that in its broadest and most ancient sense refers to the arts—that is, things crafted by humans. Martin Heidegger famously looked to the Greek word techn¯e to help articulate his understanding of art in all its forms as a kind of technology. ‘[T ]echn¯e is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman’, he explains, ‘but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techn¯e belongs to bringing-forth, to poi¯esis; it is something poietic’ (Heidegger 2009: 13). Such a formulation locates technology, like the digital, in the realm of the human, both in the sense that it is created by people and that it enables understanding about them. Heidegger goes on to assert that technology is, at its core, ‘a mode of revealing’, and that it ‘comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where al¯etheia, truth, happens’ (ibid.). Although Heidegger by no means offers an easy celebration of technology—in fact, he is deeply concerned about modern mechanization and the dangerous ‘will to mastery’ that it exhibits—he does situate the concept firmly within human experiences of making, being, and revealing (ibid.: 10). The technological and by extension the digital are forms of human creativity and ways of relating to the world. Such a view complements Jurgenson’s assertion that, in the twenty-first century (and indeed long before that), the human and the technological, the natural and the artificial, the physical and the digital are not categorical opposites to be

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chosen between, but varied ways of being and doing that interpenetrate and co-constitute one another. This is perhaps nowhere truer than in the production and experience of presence, something that, as I have suggested, is so central to definitions of performance and the theatre it creates. While the changes that come with the digital can at times seem alienatingly unpresent, Jurgenson’s emphasis on unity and wholeness across the physical and the virtual—the idea that we are living ‘one reality’, as complex as it may be—can bring greater nuance to explorations about what real, meaningful presence in a digitally attuned age looks and feels like. Computer technologies now allow people to be present in body and mind in a variety of ways, whether it’s Zooming into a meeting with colleagues, giving FaceTime to family in another country, texting eagerly (or not-so-eagerly) with a prospective date, expressing personality and taste through selfies on Instagram, or organizing and turning up for something in person through the assistance of email, Yelp, and Google Maps. These digital tools also allow people to perform in a variety of ways, staging moments of personhood, connection, spectacle, and drama for actors and audiences, both local and global. If one accepts the idea of presence, like the digital, as evolving, relational, and subjectively constituted, then the different kinds of performance—and subsequently theatre—that it creates are no more or less real than one another. This does not mean, however, that they are equally affecting or effective. As Jurgenson writes at the end of his essay, the rejection of digital dualism is not ‘to say that social media and the web should not be critiqued’ (2011). ‘Is a reality augmented by digitality a good thing?’, he asks, before concluding that his ‘job … is not to answer that question, but to help make it possible’ (ibid.). Bearing Jurgenson’s arguments in mind, in the chapters that follow I take the reality of digital experience and performance as a given, turning my attention instead to the quality of their impact, depth, and reach. Before drawing this section to a close, something must also be said about Shakespeare’s presence, and the difference it makes in discussions of digital performance. An impressive range of theatrical performance is now recorded for the digitized screen, remediated on the live stage, and written afresh for the web. And yet, Shakespeare looms especially large, due to a combination of factors including his prevalence in theatrical repertoires, the linguistic and dramatic complexity of his writing, his embeddedness in school curricula, his copyright-free texts,

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and his enduring cultural prestige. As a result, one might say that he is a very ‘present’ writer in today’s theatres, be they digital or more traditional. Such presence has extended across more than four centuries and numerous countries, contributing to the unusually high level of familiarity, permanence, and sense of significance he continues to enjoy with global audiences today. Consequently, even when Shakespeare’s work is deconstructed and dispersed through experiments in digital theatre-making, it retains a coherence and a sense of value for many spectators that less frequently performed drama, including new writing, typically would not. Take, for instance, Annie Dorsen’s ‘machine-made Hamlet ’, discussed in Chapter 1. Although this production was largely about estranging audiences from previous conceptions of Shakespeare’s tragedy, their preexisting knowledge of it—whether loose or minute—underpinned the way that this digitized project functioned. A broad sense of the plot, and perhaps even familiarity with the specifics of its language, created moments of dissonance for audience members while also enabling them to forge some sense of joined-up meaning from a very deconstructed piece of theatre. In this project and others, the familiarity of Shakespeare means that he retains a sense of presence even when his plays are reworked almost beyond recognition. Such cache is at once culturally validating, sense-inducing, and publicity-generating for theatre-makers and the audiences they hope to attract. Furthermore, the fact that millions of schoolchildren around the world continue to study Shakespeare means that there is a ready-made audience for digitally accessible, economically affordable performances of his plays, such as the broadcast of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet , also discussed in Chapter 1. Productions involving Shakespeare are considerably more likely to be broadcast than those based on the work of other playwrights: about a quarter of the NT Live programme is made up of Shakespeare productions, for instance, in comparison with about 10% of the National Theatre’s in-person season (Sullivan 2017: 629). Other theatres including the RSC, Globe, Cheek by Jowl, and Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada have added to the growing body of Shakespearean broadcasts, which have subsequently been pooled together on educational streaming platforms for use in the classroom. Shakespeare’s digital presence also extends to theatrical projects made specifically for internet viewing. In an interview about Hamlet 360, also

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discussed in Chapter 1, director Stephen Maler explained that one of his chief ambitions for the project was ‘to put into the classroom an extraordinary experience of this play, and give teachers another tool to bring the material to life’ (Harris 2019). While in many ways the experience that Maler sought to create was similar to that of an in-person immersive production like Sleep No More, it was available to audiences at a far cheaper cost: Punchdrunk tickets in New York sell for well over $100, whereas Hamlet 360 debuted online for free. Such accessibility, plus Shakespeare’s long-standing place in so many countries’ educational programmes, means that a remarkable symbiosis exists between his plays and digital experimentation. For a four-hundred-year-old author, he is exceptionally present in technology-rich forms of theatre-making. This section has touched on several major debates concerning performance and its sometimes vexed relationship with digital technology. On the one hand, traditional definitions of theatre have positioned the art form as something that happens when people come together and perform for one another in the flesh. On the other hand, digital technology has offered people new ways of being present with one another even when they’re not physically gathered in the same place. While in some ways such principles may be seen as inherently at odds with one another, a less binary understanding of presence can in fact reveal substantial common ground between these two forms of human creativity. If actors and audience members can be present with one another in different kinds of ways, then it follows that digital technology could be used to create theatre that stretches across previously unimaginable geographical, temporal, and social divides. Shakespeare, in turn, offers a culturally present, artistically rich, and institutionally legitimizing proving ground upon which to try out these new experiments, helping audiences, theorists, practitioners, and critics redefine where exactly the boundaries of theatrical performance in the twenty-first century might lie.

2.2

From Liveness to Aliveness

In the previous section, I made the case for a broadened understanding of presence in a digital age, but I did not address in detail one of the most significant and thorny issues that routinely surfaces in debates about the relationship between performance and technology: the concept of liveness. For even if one allows that the understanding of presence is expanding as a result of digital technology, many would argue that live

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presence still means being somewhere, in the flesh, at a set time and place. It is this particular kind of presence that so many theatre-makers and performance theorists see as essential to their art. ‘[T]he specific mediality of performance consists of the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators’, Erika Fischer-Lichte has argued, while Andrew James Hartley has emphasized theatre’s ‘crucially interactive dependence on the live audience’ (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 38; Hartley 2013: 11). Liveness, in the sense of being there, in person, at the same time and in the same place, continues to underpin modern definitions of theatrical performance, even as ways of ‘being there’ have multiplied with the expansion of digital technology. This section explores the idea of liveness and the theories that have shaped it over the past century, focusing especially on how it has evolved in relation to technologies of recording and presence. Although this evolution pre-dates the widespread development of digital technology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, there is no question that it has been energized by such changes. While the experience of shared time and place has traditionally informed understandings of what it means for something to be live, what has emerged as even more fundamental to the concept is the experience of that thing as living, or being ‘a-live’. With such an emphasis in mind, this section locates digital approaches to performance within the realm of genuine theatre not by rejecting the criterion of liveness, but rather by understanding it in a new way—that is, through the lens of ‘aliveness’. In 1936, the philosopher Walter Benjamin produced a short essay that has informed debates about art, technology, and liveness ever since. Known in English as ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin’s essay offered a meditation on how technologies of mass reproduction—especially visual reproduction through photography and film—were changing the nature of artistic creativity. The concept of live presence, if not the specific language of ‘liveness’ (which was only just emerging), is central to Benjamin’s analysis. ‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element’, he writes: ‘its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’ (Benjamin 1999: 214). For Benjamin, art’s power is rooted in its singularity, which is constituted in part by its particular and finite location in time and space. Reproductions of the artwork, in contrast, flatten out its history, its authenticity, and, most significantly, something Benjamin calls its ‘aura’.

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Benjamin doesn’t provide a full definition of ‘aura’ as he understands it, but throughout his essay he describes it as an ‘authority’ and ‘uniqueness’ that arises from a work of art’s concentrated ‘presence’ (ibid.: 214, 217, 223). And while he does allow that reproduction can yield some benefits, such as the possibility of ‘simultaneous collective experience’ or ‘incomparably more precise’ depictions of certain objects and actions, overall he is dismayed by the prospect of mass distribution (ibid.: 228– 9). For him, an artwork’s auratic qualities are inevitably eroded when they are relayed through photography or other forms of recording, a process that he compares to prying an oyster from its shell. ‘[T]hat which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art’, he writes, suggesting that such mediation results not only in art’s ‘far-reaching liquidation’, but also, implicitly, its death (ibid.: 215–17). For Benjamin and many theorists after him, the finite presence of a work of art contributes fundamentally to its aesthetic power, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the realm of theatrical performance. ‘Theatre’s natural resistance to reproduction made it especially valuable as a space where Benjamin’s aura might manifest’, Kirsty Sedgman has written, as did its traditional presentation in a specific time and place (2018: 29). But this elision of aura and spatio-temporal liveness, distinct from the world of recording and mediation, has not been without its critics. Writing at the end of the twentieth century, as another revolution in technological reproduction was taking place, Philip Auslander contended that there is no such thing as pure, unmediated, auratic liveness, in which technology plays no part. Instead, he argued that liveness and mediation always exist in a ‘historical and contingent’ partnership, with each helping to produce the other (Auslander 1999: 51). What exactly does Auslander mean by such a formulation? Above all, that the adjective ‘live’, and the concept of it as a spatial and temporal entity, did not in fact exist until the rise of recording technologies. Noting that the ‘earliest examples of the use of the word “live” in reference to performance come from 1934’—just a few years before the appearance of Benjamin’s essay—Auslander argues that ‘the very concept of live performance presupposes that of reproduction—that the live can exist only within an economy of reproduction’ (ibid.: 52, 54). As a result, liveness as a concept is always changing in relation to technologies of reproduction, meaning that as different forms of presence become possible, new forms of liveness necessarily emerge. For Auslander, this means that the live and the mediated can never exist as absolute opposites, and furthermore

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that one specific iteration of liveness—for instance, physical co-presence— cannot be ‘used to define intrinsic, ontological properties of performance that set it apart from mediatized forms’ (2008: 60). The experience of auratic performance, in other words, is not limited to a single mode of ‘being there’. In the preface to the second edition of his book, Auslander comments that he ‘always meant’ his work to be ‘contentious’, and some readers have gone further in suggesting that it is polemical in its strident rejection of the very idea of live, unplugged experience (ibid.: xiii). There’s no denying, however, that his central argument, first articulated in the 1990s, was hugely prescient. As we now know, the influence of digital technology would expand exponentially in the first decades of the twenty-first century, and its impact would certainly register in the world of theatrical performance. The kind of ‘intermedial’ theatre-making that Auslander traces in his book—something that Aneta Mancewicz has defined as ‘a live … artistic practice that explores the performative nature of identities and that self-reflexively integrates new media’ (2018: 27)—has only grown in recent years, to the extent that it now appears with frequency in not just the avant-garde fringes but also the theatrical mainstream. In the wake of such developments, a number of scholars have attempted to theorize liveness in a way that forges a middle ground between the absolute necessity of embodied co-presence and its total rejection. For Christopher Balme, the blending of in-person and screen presences in intermedial stage productions, and the productive effects they can have on their audiences, illustrates the extent to which ‘the relationship between the live and the mediated is far less confrontational in artistic practice than it is in academic discourse’ (2008: 85). For him, theatre has always been ‘a hypermedium … capable of incorporating, representing and on occasion even thematizing other media’; theatre audiences, in turn, come to stage productions with ‘competence and knowledge in a variety of media’, and consequently in various forms of liveness (ibid.: 90). More recently, W. B. Worthen has similarly emphasized the ever-present ‘technicity’ of theatre, by which he means its ability to absorb and perform changing technologies, as well as its fundamental status as a kind of techn¯e in and of itself (2020: 2, 28). What is complicated and even combative in theory, these scholars suggest, proves much more complementary in practice.

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Both Balme and Worthen argue that intermedial performance can be comfortably accommodated within the rubric of theatre, but the emergence of theatre broadcasting to cinemas and streaming online has posed a further challenge by entirely relocating theatrical experience to the screen. Such a move, involving as it does the total rupture of actor and audience co-presence as it has long been understood, at first glance might appear to push the notion of theatrical liveness past its breaking point. In the early years of the NT Live broadcasting programme, advocates of the form responded to this concern by emphasizing the temporal liveness of theatre relays and their reception in shared, communal places. According to John Wyver, producer of numerous UK broadcasts, the ‘fundamentals’ of theatre are still ‘present when one is watching a live event with other people gathered together in a space, irrespective of whether the event is embodied in front of you or shown on a screen and irrespective of whether that space is a theatre or a cinema’ (Purcell 2017: 287). Although everyone was not in the same physical location at once, actors and audiences were still coming together at an appointed time to create a collective theatrical moment. As theatre broadcasting proliferated, however, so too did its modes of transmission. ‘Encore’ and ‘as live’ presentations, which go out to cinemas after the original date of performance, became a way of reaching audiences in other time zones or offering further chances to see an especially popular production. And even before the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and beyond, a growing number of theatre companies had begun experimenting with streaming their work online, both in live and pre-recorded form (Sullivan 2020: 93, 102). As early as 2016, researchers for Arts Council England—the organization responsible for administering most of the country’s public arts funding—conducted an audience survey that led them to the conclusion that simultaneity ‘does not drive demand for Live-to-Digital, nor affect the quality of the audience experience’ (‘From Live-to-Digital’ 2016: 13). More important to the 1,200-plus people they spoke to were matters of economics and convenience. Although respondents certainly appreciated the opportunity to watch a performance in real time, saving money on tickets and travel and being able to see the broadcast at a time that suited them overshadowed the benefits of simultaneity (ibid.: 13–14, 23). One might ask, then, where all this leaves the supposed allure of liveness, and whether in the early decades of the twenty-first century the concept had finally run its course. While it is certainly true that digital

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recordings of stage performance have destabilized long-held notions about co-presence in the theatre, and furthermore that pragmatic issues can take precedence over the auratic romance of ‘being there’, it would be a mistake, I think, to conclude that liveness as a concept no longer holds any power. One need only look to the music industry, where digital streaming has led to an increase in live touring—due to both audience demand and a transformed economic landscape—to see that a desire for in-person experience in shared time persists (Shaw 2019). Instead, as Auslander predicted, new approaches to liveness have emerged alongside new ways of presenting and experiencing theatre. Studies of ‘as live’ broadcasts, for instance, have illustrated how spectators turn them into ‘a real-time communal phenomenon’ in their own way, whether through the creation of a sense of cultural ‘exclusivity’, as described by Michael Ingham in his discussion of Hong Kong cinema broadcast audiences, or through the cultivation of a more local experience of shared time, as explored by Keir Elam in his reflections on screenings in Italy (Ingham 2018: 188; Elam 2018: 197). The world of social media, in turn, offers a sprawling ‘third place’ where spectators around the world can gather and become a communal audience, whether they watch at the same time as the temporally live performance or at a later, agreed-upon hour through synchronized watch parties (Oldenburg 1999: 20; Nicholas 2018; Sullivan 2018; Sullivan 2020). Such examples suggest that although factors of time and space continue to influence audiences’ experiences of liveness, they do not define them in a singular way. Shared time can be created at many points in the life of a digitized piece of theatre, including the moment of its original performance, during ‘as live’ showings, or after its release as an online stream. The more significant issue for many is the feeling of meaningful connection to others, a point that recalls Auslander and his suggestion that liveness in a digital age ‘is not limited to specific performer-audience interactions but to a sense of always being connected to other people, of continuous, technologically mediated co-presence with others known and unknown’ (2008: 61). The feeling of being there, together, remains crucial, but the way that feeling comes about is not wholly dependent on occupying one specific time and place. In such contexts, the ‘live’ in liveness has less to do with something that is ‘heard or watched at the time [and place] of its occurrence’, and more with an experience that is ‘characterized by the presence of life, lively; busy, active, bustling’ (OED 2020: ‘live, adj.1, n., and adv.’, A.10a, 4a).

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Liveness in this sense is about being part of an event that is a-live with experience, engagement, and possibility, and while other people are certainly part of that process, they don’t necessarily have to be physically or even temporally co-present actors on the stage. As Martin Barker has suggested in his own consideration of the relationship between liveness and aliveness, (a)live events are defined by the way they are ‘emergent’ and ‘open up new possibilities’ for their audiences (Barker 2016: 29). These spectators might assemble in person at a specified place, or they might be a group of like-minded people who are physically remote from one another but who produce a feeling of connectedness through enthusiastic interaction online. Most essentially, they are a community of people who bring a performance to life through their collective engagement with it. They both bask in and help create its aura, a term that seems all the more fitting given its etymological roots not in anything to do with time or place, but rather in the very foundations of life: ‘aura’, after all, is the Latin word for ‘breath’ (OED 2020: ‘aura, n.’). Such a view of liveness as living, breathing, aliveness directs the term away from physical requirements about time and place and towards a particular kind of phenomenological experience that foregrounds interactivity, collectivity, and a sense of eventful connectedness. It’s an idea that bears a strong affinity to Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘the event-ness of Being’, or a state of existence produced by the openness, contingency, and ‘transitiveness’ of the present moment (1993: 1). In moments of ‘event-ness’ and ‘becoming’, individuals are at once situated in a very specific, neverto-be-repeated time, and infinitely open to influences that arise in the instant. For Bakhtin, ‘event-ness’ is about individuality and potentiality coming together to produce a radical form of presence and present-ness. Thinking back to SleepNo More, we might imagine that the experience of such labile receptivity is precisely what is being tested in each encounter between performers and audiences. Bakhtin’s highly conceptual philosophy of ‘the event-ness of Being’ is distant in many ways from digitized performance in the twenty-first century, but what the two domains do share is a fundamental stake in the experiential quality of events and the energy that participants contribute as they enliven and activate them. Not all audiences will offer the same level of engagement, of course, whether they are gathered together in person or geographically dispersed around the world. But when they do charge such moments of performance with cognitive and emotional commitment, they bring them to life in a way that goes beyond simple orientation

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in time or space. In such instances, audiences ‘communally produce new ways of “doing liveness”’ by collectively animating an aesthetic experience and bringing it to life (Barker 2013: 71). Across the wide spectrum of digital performance, the generation of festive aliveness among dispersed communities is entirely possible, though it is by no means given. According to the anthropologist Alessandro Falassi, festive moments are created by the experience of ‘time out of time’, in which normal life gives way to ‘a special temporal dimension devoted to special activities’ (1987: 4). If every performance of theatre is, ideally, a festival in miniature, defined in part by the way it transports participants to a new dimension in space and time, then the distribution of presence enabled by the internet, and especially social media, has the potential both to expand the reach of theatrical festivity and, in less productive moments, dilute it. Roger D. Abrahams has suggested that ‘festivals seize on open spots and playfully enclose them’, but the day-to-day use of social media tends to do the opposite, taking hold of existing, content-rich spots and fragmenting, layering, disassociating, and dispersing them (1987: 179). The risk, then, is that the incorporation of digital technologies into the reception of theatrical performance may thin out the specificity and boundedness of its aliveness, producing an only partially festive atmosphere that is mixed into the normal, digitally inflected rhythms of mundane life—something one might think of as ‘time within time’. For theatre-makers interested in producing new, meaningful forms of borndigital performance, the challenge is in finding ways to resist this tendency and enable more focused and attentive kinds of engagement among digitally connected audiences. At its heart, aliveness is about gripping, even hypnotic, attention, an entity that scholars of the internet have identified as increasingly scarce since the turn of the twenty-first century (Davenport and Beck 2001; Lanham 2006). In a world where many experiences can be layered onto one another simultaneously—cooking dinner, watching a performance online, texting with friends, looking after children—more is possible, but with potentially less achieved in any one area. This is one reason why liveness in a spatio-temporal sense continues to be a great generator of aliveness: it helps limit, and thereby deepen, what a person can do in a particular moment. Which brings me back to Benjamin, and the value he places on finite, in-person, material presence. If one were to subscribe wholly to his powerful meditation on the shortcomings of reproducible art, then most

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people would never have the chance to see more than a sliver of the world’s paintings, enjoy the riches of film, or listen to their favourite musician at home. And yet, he is undoubtedly right that there is a focusing power in being present with a work of art and allowing it to block out other kinds of experience, if only for a moment. This is a form of aliveness that is both intrinsic to the work in terms of its inherent aesthetic, sensory, and intellectual force, and externally generated through conditions that intensify, concentrate, and—in the case of theatre—communalize its effects. Where I part with Benjamin is in the belief that such presence is intrinsically dependent on physical, in-person experience: concentrating one’s attention can be challenging in a technologically dispersed context, but it is not impossible. Nor is it the case that simply being somewhere in person automatically engenders deep, absorbing focus. If theatre enthusiasts truly wish to share this art form with the widest audiences possible, then they must relinquish a devotion to liveness as singularly dependent on unmediated, unreproducible presence. In the case studies presented in Chapters 3–5, I explore many instances in which the aura of a work of art, and the aliveness that emerges from it, journeys back and forth across virtual and fleshy worlds, just as we as people do. In some instances, the involvement of digital (and therefore reproducible) technologies actually enhances feelings of live presence by newly focusing audience members’ attention and unsettling their expectations about how theatrical performance works. In such moments, I argue, the work of art is indisputably alive, as are the communities of people who find themselves captivated by its digitally augmented aura.

2.3

Immersion and the Body

So far this chapter has suggested that both presence and (a)liveness are subjectively experienced states of being, rather than objectively defined positions in time and space. In this sense, they can be understood as phenomenological entities rather than ontological ones—that is, ones that are produced by internal, fluid experiences rather than external, fixed criteria. At the same time, one might ask where this leaves the physical body, and the specifically corporeal forms of experience often associated with theatre. At the start of this chapter, I highlighted how central the body and sense perception are to a company like Punchdrunk. As Barrett has said, ‘The performers actually touch the audience’, producing a ‘pure

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and potent’ response that is impossible to create in the same way in a digitally mediated environment (Hemming 2013; Machon 2013: 162). While most theatre companies do not make actual, physical contact with their audience members, they do ‘touch’ and ‘move’ them in more figurative, and yet still embodied, ways. Gathered into a specific space with one another, spectators laugh, gasp, cough, unwrap sweets, lean into, slump back from, and physically experience a production together. Some research has even suggested that theatre audiences’ heart rates may start to synchronize. In one study, participants’ ‘pulses spe[d] up and slow[ed] down at the same rate’ when they watched an in-person performance together, producing ‘a common physiological experience’ across a diverse group of people (‘Audience Members’ Hearts’ 2017). While one should be cautious about becoming overly romantic about the role of the body in the experience of live, in-person theatre—the heart rate study, for instance, was funded by a theatre advertising group and never peer-reviewed—it would also be wrong to dismiss it entirely. There is a reason, after all, why Punchdrunk’s immersive approach to theatre-making has been so successful, and furthermore why the concept of immersion has become so central in recent years to a wide range of digitally generated experiences, including videogames, 3D and 360-degree films, and VR environments. In all cases, the body and its sense-making faculties are called to attention in unexpected and engrossing ways as the spectator-participant is ‘dip[ped] or plung[ed]’ into a sensory-rich world in-the-round (OED 2020: ‘immersion, n.’, 1.a). Bearing such issues in mind, this section explores the appeal of immersion in both theatre and the digital arts, paying particular attention to the importance of the physical body in both realms. As with presence and liveness, debates about the nature of immersion, and how it can be created, pre-date the digital era. Gordon Calleja has noted with some frustration how frequently the term is used as a synonym for absorption in an activity, be it ‘solving a crossword puzzle’, ‘gardening or cooking’, or interacting within ‘game environments’ (2011: 26, 28–9). In such instances, immersion signals a psychological state of intense engagement that for many (Brechtians aside) is the goal of most art. For Frank Rose, however, the rise of participatory web culture in the twenty-first century palpably changed expectations about immersive art by transforming it into something explicitly interactive. According to Rose, the ‘art of immersion’ is one that actively courts the game-like involvement of its participants, inviting them to ‘jump the screen’ and ‘inhabi[t]

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rather than consum[e]’ the work of which they are a part (2011: 15, 42). The aim of immersive creativity, he argues, is for ‘the fictional [to] blee[d] into the real, and vice versa’, and for the boundaries between life, entertainment, advertising, and art to become increasingly blurred in the process (ibid.: 319). Rose is right that reality-bending creative experiences have proliferated this century, but it’s important to note that such desires to transport the viewer in interactive and often dislocating ways have long been part of the history of art, both visual and performing. Oliver Grau has highlighted how wall paintings created during the Roman Empire play with perspective in ways that ‘blu[r] distinctions between real space and image space’, producing the ‘illusion of being in the picture’, while Kurt Vanhoutte, Nele Wynants, and Josephine Machon have traced immersive principles in the work of twentieth-century theatre-makers and performance artists including Antonin Artaud, Richard Schechner, and Marina Abromavi´c (Grau 2003: 25; Vanhoutte and Wynants 2010: 47; Machon 2013: 30–3). The difference that digital technology has made this century, however, is twofold. First, in its ability to stretch an artwork across multiple media, and to connect audience members around the world to both those media and one another, it has allowed for the proliferation of a previously discrete object (a film, painting, theatrical production, or song) into an ever-expanding universe. Second, in its continued development of tools and equipment that stimulate users’ senses, it has created new opportunities for feelings of physical immersion in a work of art—of ‘being there’ in body as well as in mind. The possibility of embodied immersion in technologically augmented art is something that has fascinated filmmakers, musicians, and theatre artists for many years. In the mid-to-late twentieth century, surround sound equipment literally encircled its listeners and used multiple audio channels to produce sensations of movement and co-presence, while IMAX screens created visual experiences so large that other optical stimuli were blocked out and feelings of dizziness or nausea sometimes occurred (Rumsey 2018: 180–3; Acland 1997: 301). Digital technology steadily decreased the scale and cost of the equipment involved in producing such effects, while also extending the ways they could interact with and even disrupt processes of bodily sensation. In the early 2000s, the adjective ‘immersive’ arose within the tech industry to describe ‘computer displays or systems that generate a three-dimensional image that appears

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to surround the user’, or, more broadly, ‘digital technology or images that deeply involve one’s senses’ (Machon 2013: 59). The primary goal of such systems was to make users feel like they were a part of the simulated experience in a way that registered as physiological as well as cognitive. Most overt in such aims have been VR platforms, which strive to transport their users to fictional worlds that have a life and agency of their own. Long the subject of science-fiction fantasies, VR tools emerged in a real way in the late 1960s with the work of Ivan Sutherland; coalesced into a nascent industry in the 1980s with companies like Jaron Lanier’s VPL Research; and finally reached household markets in the 2010s with the initially crowd-funded and then Facebook-acquired Oculus Rift (Bown et al. 2017). Though VR equipment can take different forms, it typically includes a headset that allows users to look at a digitally rendered world—whether filmed or animated—in 360 degrees. Most systems also include audio outputs that allow for immersive sonic experience alongside the visual, while some incorporate hand controllers or gloves that enable tactile feedback and spatial mapping. For many users, one of the most striking features of such systems is the physiological effects they induce. These include corporeally based perceptions of being located in another world and, more fundamentally, a heightened awareness of one’s own body. It is notable that some of the earliest experiences created for the commercial release of VR equipment in the mid-2010s were of rollercoaster rides: such sequences showcased the gut-churning, physiological responses many people had when immersed in VR worlds, with the most extreme reactions including nausea, headaches, sweating, pallor, and vomiting (Fernandes and Feiner 2016: 201). By showing how physically disoriented and discomposed VR could make people feel, these simulations highlighted how corporeally immersive the technology could be. Even if participants knew in their minds that they weren’t zipping through a fairground on a rollercoaster, their bodies weren’t always so convinced. For Lanier, often described as the ‘founding father’ of VR, the physical or ‘haptic’ experience of these immersive technologies is key—not so much because of what they do to the body in and of itself, but because of the impact such bodily experiences have on the mind (Firth 2013). ‘Haptics’, he has written, ‘includes touch and feel, and how the body senses its own shape and motion, and the resistance of obstacles’ (Lanier 2017: 123). ‘It’s the sense that overlaps the most with the other senses’, he continues; it’s ‘how the body senses itself and the world’ (ibid.:

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123–4). While VR experiences like the rollercoaster ride have shown that stimulating a participant’s powers of sight and sound alone can produce intensely haptic effects, Lanier’s contributions to the industry have focused on bringing touch, and other forms of physical interaction, directly into virtual environments. As an early developer and champion of the DataGlove—a ‘slick black mesh woven through with fiber optic sensors’, which allowed a participant’s hand to appear in a simulated world—Lanier has repeatedly emphasized how impactful it was for him, as both a user and a creator, to witness his own body in VR (ibid.: xii– xiii). ‘When you could bring your body in there, you were not just an observer, but a native’, he writes, arguing that the result was ‘improved perception’ of oneself and one’s relationship to the surrounding world (ibid.). Although many of Lanier’s ambitions for VR are still yet to be realized, the value of touch-oriented, haptic interaction in VR environments is something that commercial developers have recognized in an increasingly programmatic way. In June 2020, Oculus announced that it would discontinue its budget-range headset, the Oculus Go, which was powered by the user’s smartphone and offered lower-resolution, more portable experiences that were visually and aurally immersive, but not haptically so (‘Update on the Evolution’ 2020). Unlike more advanced headsets, the Go did not include hand controllers that enable tactile feedback and, even more crucially, the digital mapping of the participant’s body into the virtually simulated world. Such mapping allows for what is known as ‘six degrees of freedom’ (6DoF), or the ability of a body to move in a threedimensional, digitally rendered space. What such freedom also opens up is the possibility of embodied interaction in VR, both between a participant and a virtual world—and, potentially, between multiple participants at the same time. It is in this last formulation that the prospect of shared, embodied co-presence, and the kinds of performance so often associated with it, starts to emerge—though there remains a significant gap between the reality of VR tools and their long-imagined promise. Still, 6DoF allows users not just to observe other people, but to move towards them, talk with them, and engage in an unscripted and unprogrammed feedback loop between them and oneself. This is not, of course, how most theatre works: there typically is a script, as well as boundaries between performers and spectators (not to mention spectators and other spectators) that are at once implied and physically imposed through architectural layouts and

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seating arrangements. The idea of theatre, however, often invokes a desire for open-ended forms of togetherness that not only immerse participants in the embodied presence of others, but also invite them to become an ‘audience to themselves’ (Jarvis 2019: 76). Liam Jarvis has proposed this idea of being an ‘audience’ to oneself as a way of describing the experience of participating in live, in-person, immersive theatre, such as that produced by Punchdrunk. But it is worth noting the affinity between his words and Lanier’s account of VR as an experience that can generate new ‘subjectivities’ by revealing ‘physicality … in fresh light’ (Lanier 2017: 128, xiii). In both cases, the focus is on the spectator-participant observing and experiencing themself anew. Such a self is neither separate from, nor wholly subsumed within, the physical body—rather, it is constituted, in part, by it. This emphatic reclamation of the embodied self, after a centuries-long tradition of a more dualistic, Cartesian paradigm, is surely one reason why immersive theatre as a genre rose to such prominence in the early decades of the twenty-first century. For Machon, the success of such work lies in its recognition of the fact that audiences have ‘a genuine wish to make human contact’—specifically, physical contact—‘with another human as much as with the work itself’ (2013: 25). Immersive theatre ‘demands bodily engagement, sensually stimulates the imagination, [and] requires tactility’, and while such qualities manifest themselves in very distinctive ways in a production like SleepNo More, they are not altogether different from the kinds of effects that VR developers are chasing, if still not quite realising, in the digital realm (ibid.: 26). It is telling, for instance, that immersive theatre and mainstream VR equipment came of age at roughly the same time: although the first VR lab dates back to the early 1980s, it wasn’t until the early 2010s and the launch of the crowd-funded Oculus Rift headset that VR equipment started to become available and affordable to households or theatres. Likewise, although site-specific and interactive forms of theatre-making have existed for decades, if not centuries, immersive theatre as a specifically defined genre only started to take shape in the 2000s before rapidly rising to fame in the 2010s. In both cases, these forms of interactive storytelling respond to a ‘desire to experience more fully’, and to discover worlds of ‘unbounded experience’ that are at once fictional and very real (ibid.; Lanier 2017: 2).

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Also instructive is how immersive theatre and VR technologies have both generated attention for the way they flirt with—and commoditize—the erotic, be it imagined or actual. One early blog post about SleepNo More offered a guide to finding ‘all the nudity’ in the show—and implicitly all the fantasies that attend it—while Colette Gordon has highlighted how audience responses to the production frequently celebrate its atmosphere of ‘sexualized contact’ and ‘charged, exclusive intimacy’ (Moylan 2011; Gordon 2013). In the world of VR, the centrality of sexual desire is more explicit: one of the biggest pornography websites in the world, for instance, reported in 2017 that VR content had been among its biggest growth areas, while lockdowns due to the COVID19 pandemic offered the industry a further boost (‘Virtual Reality Porn’ 2017; Dodgson 2020). For better or for worse, both areas of creative practice have explored and at times exploited the potential for immersive experience to stimulate yearnings of the body, producing reality-bending situations that at once disorient and tantalize their audiences. Despite its many possibilities, however, VR remains an unfamiliar and largely inaccessible technology for most people—not to mention an imperfect one. In the UK, only 4% of the population had access to VR equipment in their homes in 2020, a figure that rose only slightly higher in the US to 6% (Tankovska 2020). One might wonder, then, whether feelings of embodied immersion can arise through the use of more familiar, lo-fi, and even banal technologies—such as two-dimensional video streams, social media platforms, or video-conferencing software— that are the subject of much of this book. As far as broadcasting goes, no major theatre has yet released a full-length recording of a Shakespearean stage production in 360-degree, VR video for public consumption, though the RSC did create one of Blanche McIntyre’s 2017 Titus Andronicus for internal research purposes (‘Shakespeare Still Has Power’ 2017). At the same time, many two-dimensional broadcasts of Shakespearean productions have revealed their own immersive aspirations in the way they cut artfully and sometimes swiftly between different camera angles, producing intimate, involving, and at times spatially disorienting experiences of the performance for their spectators. In her account of attending NT Live screenings in the US, for instance, Ann M. Martinez has observed how both the ‘theatre-like’ atmosphere in cinemas and the ‘visual proximity’ afforded by the camera help create an ‘immersive and communal’ experience for a geographically remote audience (2018: 199, 204). For her, the feeling of ‘being there’ is doubled

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through the visual evocation of being present both in the live, in-person theatre audience and, at times, in the world of the production. ‘A cinema audience member can experience the feeling of floating over the stage, in the space of the stage, and through the scene itself’, she writes (ibid.: 201). With traditional boundaries between ‘here’ and ‘there’ dissolved, broadcast recordings can produce the sense of being located within the theatrical action, as opposed to seated at some distance in an auditorium. Such an experience is arguably more absorbing than watching in-person theatre from an auditorium’s cheaper seats, which often offer obstructed and uncomfortable views. Intermedial stage productions that make use of live video feeds can also offer a feeling of greater bodily proximity and, with it, new perspectives on the relationship between self and other. Companies have frequently used on-stage video to create closer, more intimate, and sometimes illicit views of their performers and the action taking place. These digital periscopes— peepholes even—invite audiences to see beyond the naked eye, opening up visual and ethical territory that Aebischer has astutely characterized as the ‘ob-scene’. For her, ‘ob-scene’ performance is that which is traditionally off-stage and therefore out of sight, as well as that which is excessive and therefore provocative (2020: 18–19). Such technologies, she argues, ‘intensify, rather than obsolesce, precisely the intense sensation of copresence that is associated with ethico-political modes of spectatorship’ (ibid: 10). In doing so, they can create feelings of sensory immersion and physical closeness that engage and electrify as well as disorient and discomfort. In such moments of ‘ob-scene’ performance, ‘being there’ means bearing witness in a way that goes beyond the perspective typically offered in an analogue theatrical encounter, or even in a more intimate, interpersonal conversation. It is a kind of ‘being with’ that can produce a heightened sense of contact between the spectator and the spectated, resulting in feelings of both identification and uneasiness. Within the often more mundane world of social media platforms, and the forms of theatre they have enabled, the body is often conspicuously absent. In projects like the RSC’s Such Tweet Sorrow and Midsummer Night’s Dreaming —adaptations of Romeo and Juliet for Twitter and Midsummer for Google+ that I discuss in Chapter 5—the written word becomes the primary vehicle for performance, much as it has in many people’s increasingly text-based lives. And yet, immersion in the sense of involvement in the story, and the blurring of real and fictional life, is often a guiding principle in such projects. ‘[I]f other media presume

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minimum participation, new media constitute additional layers of intervention’, Stephen O’Neill has argued, while Frank Rose has suggested that the rise of such media has ‘created an authorship crisis’ (O’Neill 2014: 12; Rose 2011: 83). Interactivity is fundamental to social media platforms, and theatrical projects that draw on such technologies for their performances necessarily invite participation from their audiences, as well as elaboration when spectators assume the role of co-author and push the drama in new directions. In some cases, embodied presence re-enters through webcam streams and selfie sharing, which can offer an increased sense of intimacy and the feelings of closeness that sometimes—though by no means always—come with it. Such examples stretch the idea of immersion and digital performance in many directions, but one quality that they all share is a strong reliance on visual experience and the kinds of artistry it enables. Immersion in the context of digitally intensive theatre is very often about looking in an up-close, multi-perspectival way that produces feelings of spatial proximity and embodied presence. Sound can also play a central role in such experiences: the audio track of a broadcast, of a moment of intermedial performance, or of a social media interaction can both intensify and disrupt feelings of immersion. Still, for many audience members it registers second to what is seen, even as it underpins and sometimes surpasses visual creativity in terms of unconscious impact and virtuosic craft. Given the dominance of sight and sound, as well as the very nature of digitized experience, we might conclude that the body’s other three senses play a minimal and even non-existent role in computer-enabled performance. And yet, it is worth emphasizing again how touch—be it actual or imagined—is the quality most ardently dreamed of by so many digital theatre-makers and their audiences. Perhaps this is because being able to touch someone implies being part of a shared world with them— of being immersed in something that is physically as well as cognitively involving, and that therefore seems more real. In the examples that follow, I highlight how a desire for the tactile body—of the actor, of the spectator—surfaces repeatedly, alongside the search for a boundary-defying immersion that might bring it closer. At the heart of such encounters, as diverse as they are, is a working out of what it means to be there with other people, and to be part of something that is touching in the most profound sense of the word.

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2.4

Administering the Digital

Throughout this chapter, I have argued for the many affinities between theatrical performance and digital culture, including a preoccupation with the nature of presence, an exploration of what it means to be connected through (a)liveness, and a yearning for embodied agency through immersive craft. And yet, in more practical terms, theatre and digital technology have until recently remained uncommon friends. Of course, there are numerous theatre companies and practitioners who have long specialized in digitally intensive approaches to performance, and in the opening sections of the chapters that follow I discuss several examples of their ground-breaking work. But in terms of the wider, more mainstream theatre industry—at least in the UK—the centring of digital technology in the creation and distribution of theatrical performance has been relatively unusual. Such reluctance has suggested a persisting anxiety, and perhaps even antipathy, among theatre-makers and theatre-goers about the kinds of experience that digital tools engender. In the UK, this uncertainty is most patently evident in the regular reviews of digital activity among arts organizations that Arts Council England and Nesta, a digital innovation charity, conducted between 2013–19. Year on year, theatre companies appeared at the bottom of the list when it came to the use of digital technology for distributing creative work, the overall impact of such technology on their organization, and the likelihood that their staff were digital leaders in the arts (‘Digital Culture’ 2013: 23, 45; ‘Digital Culture’ 2014: 10, 29–30; ‘Digital Culture’ 2015: 6, 10, 22; ‘Digital Culture’ 2017: 26, 33; ‘Digital Culture 2019: Theatre’ 2020: 1, 9). According to a theatre-specific factsheet produced in 2015, although theatre organizations reported using digital technology extensively for operational and marketing activities, they ‘place[d] significantly less importance on digital for distribution (33 per cent vs. 52 per cent for the sector as a whole)’ (‘Digital Culture 2015: Theatre’ 2015: 1). Likewise, they were ‘significantly less likely’ to ‘create digital works connected to an exhibition or artwork (14 per cent vs. 29 per cent), or create standalone digital exhibits or works of art (8 per cent vs. 23 per cent)’ (ibid.: 2). In comparison with their counterparts in music, the visual arts, museums, and dance, theatre organizations appeared less inclined to experiment with digital technology as a way of creating and disseminating artistic work. Though theatre as an art form did see some increases in the reports that followed in 2017–19, its use of technology still remained lower than the

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sector average (‘Digital Culture 2017: Theatre’ 2017: 1; ‘Digital Culture 2019: Theatre’ 2020: 1). Furthermore, by 2019, arts organizations across the board seemed to be experiencing something of a digital slump: they were ‘becoming less experimental and more risk averse in their approach to digital technologies’, the Arts Council and Nesta researchers found, while members of senior management were becoming less knowledgeable about such technologies and less interested in using them (‘Digital Culture’ 2020: 6). The report’s authors warned that such findings ‘could point to a failure of organizational culture to evolve and adapt in response to digital opportunities’, and, implicitly, that such trends might produce a less accessible and less innovative culture sector as a result (ibid.). Hindsight, of course, is everything: the delayed report for 2019 entered the public domain on 7 February 2020, about six weeks before the UK went into a nationwide lockdown due to COVID-19, along with most of the rest of Europe. By the end of March, countless theatres around the world had shut their doors, and many would not reopen until well into 2021, if not later. It’s no exaggeration to suggest that the interval between going dark and returning to something resembling normal working practices was one of the greatest challenges ever faced by the performing arts industry. For a sector rooted in the principle of coming physically together to experience a work of art, the imperative to stay at home was devastating. And yet, in spite of the unpromising data recorded in the Arts Council and Nesta reports in the years leading up to the pandemic, theatre-makers did find ways of using digital tools to share their work with audiences during a time of unprecedented physical separation. Early in 2020, a flurry of recordings of past productions from established theatres in the UK, Germany, France, and the US appeared online, often for free and for a limited time. Not long after that, several companies—typically smaller and sometimes very recently formed—began creating new work, often using Zoom and YouTube and relying on a combination of audience donations, paid ticketing, and volunteer performances to keep them going. ‘With theatres closed, in the performing arts it really did feel like we were fighting for our lives in an enormous storm over which we had no control’, wrote Lucy Askew of Creation Theatre Company and Zoë Seaton of Big Telly, two smaller organizations in the UK that attracted international attention for their Zoom adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays (see Chapter 5) (Aebischer and Nicholas 2020: 2). Their decision to

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charge for tickets to their productions paid off—they were able to offer their team union wages and even ‘make a modest surplus’—but many other companies struggled to emulate their hard-won success (ibid.: 7). At the time of writing, it is still too early to know what the longterm effects of the COVID-19 lockdowns will be on the performing arts. Early research into audience behaviour in the UK suggested that ‘filmed performances of theatre, concerts and/or dance shows’ attracted a greater number of new viewers, as well as more repeat viewers, than any other art form surveyed (Bakhshi 2020a). On the one hand, such data may indicate that theatre is at last on the cusp of a digital sea change, and thus poised to follow in the wake of music, literature, and film, which have already gone through major upheavals in distribution and creation methods as a result of new technologies. On the other hand, it is possible that this online activity may prove a temporary bridging device rather than a marker of long-term change. According to the same study, by the end of the summer of 2020 ‘the overall percentage of adults doing these activities’—that is, engaging with the performing arts online—had fallen considerably (Bakhshi 2020b). What happened in lockdown, such data suggest, could end up staying there. Meanwhile, in the culture sections of major newspapers, critics have debated the benefits and limitations of the ‘hybrid’ or ‘amphibious’ forms of theatre-making that emerged during the COVID-19 lockdowns, asking themselves if they would ‘still be talking about these digital shows’ after the pandemic subsided (Brantley et al. 2020). While some wished them well—‘I want them to proliferate’, Jesse Green, The New York Times ’s cochief theatre critic, commented—others looked forward to bidding them farewell (ibid.). ‘Physical presence is part of the essence of theatre; so is occupying a common space’, wrote Laura Collins-Hughes in a counterpoint article entitled ‘Digital Theater Isn’t Theater’ (2020). Watching performance online during the pandemic, she argued, was an act of grieving and waiting—of participating in a collective cultural vigil—and not an invitation for lasting change. For established theatre-goers, this sense of grief for what was lost was of course very real, but such dismissals failed to engage with the possibility that new audiences, previously unacquainted with or even excluded from theatrical activity, might have experienced unexpected gains during this period of extraordinary change. One audience study carried out in 2016 in the UK found that 60% of the population did not attend theatre at all, and just 22% in a ‘highly engaged’ or recurrent way. The largest

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age-group among theatre-goers was 65–74, with an average age of 52 (Torreggiani 2016: 7, 9, 13). There has long been a large proportion of the population in the UK, and presumably other countries too, that is not reached by traditional theatre-making. If one adds to this the fact that in-person theatre takes a considerable toll on the environment, producing an estimated 50,000 tonnes of carbon emissions in London alone, then a clear practical and ethical case for exploring new ways of working emerges (‘Green Theatre’ 2008: 8–9). It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that in many places the world is both literally and metaphorically on fire, and that ‘business as usual’ cannot continue forever. As the pandemic has waned, digital experimentation in the theatre has appeared to slow down, though it is unlikely that it will be abandoned altogether. Long-seeded shifts in audience preferences and funding priorities mean that the impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns on theatremaking, while calamitous and unprecedented, was not unconnected to wider change within the sector. As this chapter has shown, audiences and practitioners have long celebrated theatre’s apparent opposition to digital technology, and yet these realms of creativity and interactivity share a number of fundamental interests. What does it mean to be present with others? What does it take for an artistic experience to feel (a)live? How is deep, absorptive attention created, and what happens to people’s bodies and minds when it takes hold of them? The chapters that follow explore such questions through a series of case studies, mostly from the 2010s but also in the decades—and in a few cases, the centuries—leading up to those years. In their variety they show how diverse the digital performance of Shakespeare is in practice, while in their areas of overlap they highlight how perennially obsessed it is with what it means to be there, to be present, and ultimately just to be. Together they help illuminate how digital technologies that are fast becoming naturalized in twenty-first-century life can intensify as well as abbreviate experiences of emotion, intimacy, narrative, presence, and togetherness, both in the theatre and the world that surrounds it. They show how the works of Shakespeare, with their own monumental presence and their thought-provoking richness, offer an enticing arena in which the possibilities of new digital tools can be tested in an attentiongenerating manner. Above all, they illustrate how the supposed impasse between theatre and digital technology—and, by extension, between ‘real’

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and ‘virtual’ life—is, like so many theoretical binaries, far more flexible in practice. The most successful experiments in digitally performed Shakespeare, I will argue, embrace rather than shy away from this messy complexity as they investigate what a collection of four-hundred-year-old plays can reveal to contemporary audiences about their lives and the technologies that define them. All the examples discussed in this book are boundarypushing in their exploration of what theatre looks and feels like in a digitally networked age, with the most skilful among them holding fast to the theatrical values of co-presence, aliveness, and embodied experience while simultaneously revelling in the artistic techniques and cognitive disruptions that digital media can enable. Intelligent hybridity is a core value of such work, as is a keen sense of audience and purpose. When all these elements come together, the result is something truly extraordinary: a startlingly alive exchange of energy between actors and audiences, stretched across time, space, communities, and different ways of being.

Notes 1. Part of this chapter first appeared as ‘The Audience Is Present: Aliveness, Social Media, and the Theatre Broadcast Experience’ (2018), in Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Laurie Osborne (eds) Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience (London: Bloomsbury), 59–75. I am grateful to Bloomsbury for permission to republish this material. 2. Both productions temporarily closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Shanghai version reopening in June 2020 and the New York version in February 2022.

Productions Consulted Barrett, Felix and Maxine Doyle (2014) Sleep No More, Punchdrunk, New York, 10 May [again on 17 December 2015].

Works Cited Abrahams, Roger D. (1987) ‘An American Vocabulary of Celebrations’, in Alessandro Falassi (ed.) Time out of Time: Essays on the Festival, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 175–83.

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Acland, Charles R. (1997) ‘IMAX in Canadian Cinema: Geographic Transformation and Discourses of Nationhood’, Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies 3:2, 289–305. Aebischer, Pascale (2020) Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aebischer, Pascale and Rachael Nicholas (2020) ‘Digital Theatre Transformation: A Case Study and Digital Toolkit’, Creation Theatre, October, https://www. creationtheatre.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Final-full-reportfor-web-reduced-compressed.pdf [accessed 19 August 2021]. Akhtar, Ayad (2017) ‘An Antidote to Digital Dehumanization? Live Theater’, The New York Times, 29 December, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/ 29/theater/ayad-akhtar-steinberg-award-digital-dehumanization-live-theater. html [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Audience Members’ Hearts Beat Together at the Theatre’ (2017) UCL Psychology and Language Sciences, 17 November, https://www.ucl.ac. uk/pals/news/2017/nov/audience-members-hearts-beat-together-theatre [accessed 15 February 2022]. Auslander, Philip (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 1st ed., London: Routledge. Auslander, Philip (2008) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed., Abingdon: Routledge. Bakhshi, Hasan (2020a) ‘Cultural Consumption in the UK during the COVID19 Lockdown’, Policies and Evidence Centre, 29 April, https://www.pec.ac. uk/blog/cultural-consumption [accessed 15 February 2022]. Bakhshi, Hasan (2020b) ‘What We Learned About Digital Cultural Consumption as We Went in and Then Came Out of Lockdown’, Policies and Evidence Centre, 26 November, https://www.pec.ac.uk/blog/what-we-lea rned-about-digital-cultural-consumption-as-we-went-in-and-then-came-outof-lockdown [accessed 15 February 2022]. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the Act, ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist, trans. Liapunov, Austin: University of Texas. Balme, Christopher (2008) ‘Surrogate Stages: Theatre, Performance and the Challenge of New Media’, Performance Research 13:2, 80–91. Barker, Martin (2013) Live to Your Local Cinema: The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Barker, Martin (2016) ‘Coming A(live): A Prolegomenon to Any Future Research on “Liveness”’, in Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London: Routledge, 21–33. Benjamin, Walter (1999) Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, London: Pimlico. Blake, Bill (2014) Theatre and the Digital, forward by Matt Adams, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge: MIT Press. Bown, Johnathan, Elisa White, and Akshya Boopalan (2017) ‘Looking for the Ultimate Display: A Brief History of Virtual Reality’, in Jayne Gackenbach and Johnathan Bown (eds) Boundaries of Self and Reality Online, London: Elsevier, 239–59. Brantley, Ben, Jesse Green, and Maya Phillips (2020) ‘This Is Theater in 2020. Will It Last? Should It?’ The New York Times, 8 July, https://www.nyt imes.com/2020/07/08/theater/streaming-theater-experiments.html?action= click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article [accessed 15 February 2022]. Brook, Peter (1968) The Empty Space, London: MacGibbon & Kee. Calleja, Gordon (2011) In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation, Cambridge: MIT Press. Cartelli, Thomas (2013) ‘Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More: Masks, Unmaskings, One-on-Ones’, Borrowers and Lenders 7:2, https://openjournals.libs.uga. edu/borrowers/article/view/2188/2080 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Collins-Hughes, Laura (2020) ‘Digital Theater Isn’t Theater. It’s a Way to Mourn Its Absence’, The New York Times, 8 July, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/07/08/theater/live-theater-absence.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Davenport, Thomas H. and John C. Beck (2001) The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Dickinson, Dan (2011) ‘Games of 2011: Sleep No More’, Dan Dickinson, 25 December, https://vjarmy.com/archives/2011/12/games-of-2011-sleepno-more.php [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Digital Culture: How Arts and Cultural Organisations in England Use Technology’ (2013) Arts Council England, https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/def ault/files/download-file/DigitalCulture_FullReport_2013.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Digital Culture 2014: How Arts and Cultural Organisations in England Use Technology’ (2014) Arts Council England, https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/ sites/default/files/download-file/Digital-Culture-2014-Research-Report2. pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Digital Culture 2015: How Arts and Cultural Organisations in England Use Technology’ (2015) Arts Council England, https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/ sites/default/files/download-file/Digital-Culture-2015-Final.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Digital Culture 2015: Theatre’ (2015) Arts Council England, https://www. artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Digital-Culture-2015THEATRE-FACT-SHEET.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022].

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‘Digital Culture 2017’ (2017) Arts Council England, https://www.artscouncil. org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Digital%20Culture%202017_0.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Digital Culture 2017: Theatre’ (2017) Arts Council England, https://www. artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/DC2017%20Theatre%20factsheet.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Digital Culture 2019’ (2020) Arts Council England, https://www.artscouncil. org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Digital-Culture-2019.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Digital Culture 2019: Theatre’ (2020) Arts Council England, https://www. artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/DC2019-Theatre-factsh eet.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. Dinnen, Zara (2018) The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Dodgson, Lindsay (2020) ‘Adult Entertainment Industry Sees Rise in VR Porn During Coronavirus Pandemic’, Insider, 5 April, https://www.insider. com/adult-entertainment-industry-seeing-rise-in-vr-porn-isolation-2020-3 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Elam, Keir (2018) ‘Very Like a Film: Hamlet Live in Bologna’, in Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Laurie Osborne (eds) Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience, London: Bloomsbury, 193–8. Falassi, Alessandro (1987) ‘Festival: Definition and Morphology’, in Falassi (ed.) Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1–10. Fernandes, Ajoy S. and Steven K. Feiner (2016) ‘Combatting VR Sickness Through Subtle Dynamic Field-of-View Modification’, IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces, 201–10. Firth, Niall (2013) ‘Virtual Reality: Meet Founding Father Jaron Lanier’, New Scientist, 19 June, https://institutions.newscientist.com/article/mg2 1829226-000-virtual-reality-meet-founding-father-jaron-lanier/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2008) The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. S. I. Jain, London: Routledge. Fortier, Mark (2016) Theory/Theatre: An Introduction, 3rd ed., Abingdon: Routledge. ‘From Live-to-Digital: Understanding the Impact of Digital Developments in Theatre on Audiences, Production, and Distribution’ (2016) Arts Council England, 11 October, https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/ download-file/From_Live_to_Digital_OCT2016.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday.

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Gordon, Colette (2013) ‘Touching the Spectator: Intimacy, Immersion, and the Theater of the Velvet Rope’, Borrowers and Lenders 7:2, https://openjourn als.libs.uga.edu/borrowers/article/view/2186/2076 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Grant, Drew (2011) ‘Sleep No More: Shakespeare Meets Internet Games’, Salon, 16 August, https://www.salon.com/2011/08/16/sleep_no_more_a rgs/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Grau, Oliver (2003) Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, Cambridge: MIT Press. ‘Green Theatre: Taking Action on Climate Change’ (2008) Greater London Authority, September, https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/ files/green_theatre_summary.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. Harris, Elizabeth A. (2019) ‘Hamlet in Virtual Reality Casts the Viewer in the Play’, The New York Times, 25 January, https://www.nytimes. com/2019/01/25/theater/hamlet-virtual-reality-google.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Hartley, Andrew James (2013) Shakespeare and Political Theatre in Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Heidegger, Martin (2009) ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in David M. Kaplan (ed.) Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, Plymouth: Roman and Littlefield, 9–24. Hemming, Sarah (2013) ‘“It’s All About Presence”’, Financial Times, 7 June, https://www.ft.com/content/535443ba-cc68-11e2-bb22-00144f eab7de [accessed 15 February 2022]. Herzog, Amy (2013) ‘“Charm the Air to Give a Sound”: The Uncanny Soundscape of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More’, in Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 191–213. Ingham, Michael (2018) ‘Shakespeare and the Theatre Broadcast Experience: A View from Hong Kong’, in Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Laurie Osborne (eds) Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience, London: Bloomsbury, 185–92. Jarvis, Liam (2019) Immersive Embodiment: Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation, Cham: Palgrave. Judge, Alysia (2019) ‘“Playable Shows Are the Future”: What Punchdrunk Theatre Learned from Games’, The Guardian, 8 February, https://www. theguardian.com/games/2019/feb/08/playable-shows-are-the-future-whatpunchdrunk-theatre-learned-from-video-games [accessed 15 February 2022]. Jurgenson, Nathan (2011) ‘Digital Dualism Versus Augmented Reality’, Cyborgology, 24 February, https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/ 24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Lanham, Richard A. (2006) The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Lanier, Jaron (2017) Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, London: Bodley Head. Machon, Josephine (2013) Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Mancewicz, Aneta (2018) ‘Intermedial Performance as a Public Sphere’, in Katia Arfara, Mancewicz, and Ralf Remshardt (eds) Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere, Cham: Palgrave, 27–42. Martinez, Ann M. (2018) ‘Shakespeare at a Theatre Near You: Student Engagement in Northeast Ohio’, in Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Laurie Osborne (eds) Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience, London: Bloomsbury, 199–205. Moylan, Brian (2011) ‘How to Find All the Nudity in Sleep No More’, Gawker, 8 December, https://gawker.com/5866346/how-to-find-all-the-nudity-insleep-no-more [accessed 15 February 2022]. Nicholas, Rachael (2018) ‘Understanding “New” Encounters with Shakespeare: Hybrid Media and Emerging Audience Behaviours’, in Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Laurie Osborne (eds) Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience, London: Bloomsbury, 77–92. OED (Oxford English Dictionary) (2020) Oxford: Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Oldenburg, Ray (1999) The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, New York: Marlowe & Company. O’Neill, Stephen (2014) Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard, London: Bloomsbury. Phelan, Peggy (1996) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge. Purcell, Stephen (2017) ‘“It’s All a Bit of a Risk”: Reformulating “Liveness” in Twenty-First-Century Performances of Shakespeare’, in James C. Bulman (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 284–301. Rose, Frank (2011) The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, New York: W. W. Norton. Rumsey, Francis (2018) ‘Surround Sound’, in Agnieszka Roginska and Paul Geluso (eds) Immersive Sound: The Art and Science of Binaural and Multi-channel Audio, Abingdon: Routledge, 180–220. Schechner, Richard (1990) ‘Magnitudes of Performance’, in Schechner and Willa Appel (eds) By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19–49. Schreier, Jason (2011) ‘Interactive Play Sleep No More Feels Like a Game, but More Confusing’, Wired, 8 March, https://www.wired.com/2011/08/sleepno-more/ [accessed 15 February 2022].

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‘The Search and the Tail: Approaches to Experiencing Sleep No More’ (2012) Behind a White Mask, https://behindawhitemask.tumblr.com/post/260768 99539/the-search-and-the-tail-approaches-to [accessed 15 February 2022]. Sedgman, Kirsty (2018) The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing, and the Live Performance Experience, Cham: Palgrave. ‘Shakespeare Still Has Power to Shock—RSC Titus Andronics Audience Research Project Results’ (2017) Royal Shakespeare Company, https://www. rsc.org.uk/press/releases/shakespeare-still-has-power-to-shock---rsc-titus-and ronicus-audience-research-project-results [accessed 15 February 2022]. Shaw, Lucas (2019) ‘Concerts Are More Expensive Than Ever, and Fans Keep Paying Up’, Bloomberg, 10 September, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2019-09-10/concerts-are-more-expensive-than-ever-and-fans-keeppaying-up [accessed 15 February 2022]. Sullivan, Erin (2017) ‘“The Forms of Things Unknown”: Shakespeare and the Rise of the Live Broadcast’, Shakespeare Bulletin 35:4, 627–62. Sullivan, Erin (2018) ‘The Audience is Present: Aliveness, Social Media, and the Theatre Broadcast Experience’, in Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Laurie Osborne (eds) Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience, London: Bloomsbury, 59–75. Sullivan, Erin (2020) ‘Live to Your Living Room: Streamed Theatre, Audience Experience, and the Globe’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Participations 17:1, https://www.participations.org/Volume%2017/Issue%201/7.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. Tankovska, H. (2020) ‘Share of Individuals Who Have Access to a Virtual Reality Device in Their Household in 2020, by Country’, Statistica, 1 September, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107878/access-to-virtualreality-device-in-households-worldwide/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Torreggiani, Anne (2016) ‘Who Will Our Audiences Be?’, The Audience Agency, https://www.theaudienceagency.org/asset/1104 [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘An Update on the Evolution of the Oculus Platform’ (2020), Oculus, 23 June, https://www.oculus.com/blog/an-update-on-the-evolution-of-the-ocu lus-platform-/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Vanhoutte, Kurt and Neil Wynants (2010) ‘Immersion’, in Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin Nelson (eds) Mapping Intermediality in Performance, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 47. ‘Virtual Reality Porn’ (2017) Pornhub Insights, 11 May, https://www.pornhub. com/insights/virtual-reality [accessed 15 February 2022]. Worthen, W. B. (2020) Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Broadcast Stage

In 2009, the National Theatre in London embarked on an experiment.1 Inspired by the New York Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD series, which had launched three years earlier, producers at the National set about exploring what it would take to relay one of their stage productions in real time to cinemas around the world. With seed funding from the UK charity Nesta—an ‘innovation foundation’ dedicated to ‘back[ing] new ideas that tackle big challenges’—a small working group put into action a plan to live broadcast the theatre’s summer production of Jean Racine’s Phèdre, directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Helen Mirren (‘About Us’ 2017). The screening proved a resounding success. In addition to attracting a global audience of more than fifty thousand people—roughly equivalent to the total in-house audience for the production’s entire, three-month run—it received a five-star review from Michael Billington, the UK’s foremost theatre critic at the time, who argued that it showed how ‘a theatre production can be made democratically available to a mass audience without any loss of quality’ (Bakhshi and Throsby 2014: 2; Billington 2009). In the years that followed, what started as a tentative ‘feasibility study’ swiftly evolved into a large-scale, digital broadcasting programme that would become a centrepiece in the National’s artistic mission and a model that theatres around the world would try to follow (‘NT Live’ 2011: 8). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Sullivan, Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice, Shakespeare in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05763-2_3

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This chapter explores the rise of live broadcasting and its impact on both the creation and reception of theatre in the twenty-first century. It begins by looking back at earlier technological experiments in the live relay of the performing arts, considering how the development of digital distribution in recent decades is at once continuous with and distinct from the longer history of arts broadcasting from which it has emerged. While questions about the impact of mediated forms of theatre on audiences’ experiences of presence, immersion, and liveness have been asked for many years, the systematic growth in broadcasting since the debut of NT Live—and the subsequent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on online distribution—has resulted in an increasingly widespread culture of remote spectatorship and a proliferation of theatre-on-screen projects. Within this context, Shakespeare’s plays have emerged as key texts for broadcast theatre, due to a combination of their prominence in theatrical repertoires, their compulsory status in many school curricula, and their recognisability among audiences around the world (Sullivan 2017: 629). With such issues in mind, this chapter considers how the different kinds of camerawork involved in digital broadcasts of Shakespearean performance produce a wide range of visual experiences that move between theatrical, televisual, and cinematic forms of spectatorship. While none of these modes is inherently superior to another, they are in many cases emphatically different in their approach to representing—and at times reshaping—the nature of stage performance and the role of space, emotion, and drama within it. By drawing attention to such matters, this chapter attempts to make visible a form of artistry, enabled by digital technology, that too often goes unseen—or, to recall Chapter 2, that is experienced as banal in contemporary life. In doing so, I show how the complex craft of filming and editing for broadcast is simultaneously extending and remaking the experience of Shakespeare on stage. As in all the chapters that follow, I argue that the most engrossing and accomplished instances of this form of digital performance are those that retain fundamentally theatrical principles—including a sense of continuous space and a feeling of (a)live presence—while simultaneously introducing new affordances from the screen technologies with which they engage. In the case of theatre broadcasts and recordings, those affordances include judicious close ups, soaring wide shots, and an abiding awareness of the mise-en-scène—or, perhaps more aptly for this hybrid form, the mise-en-screen. Such modes of presentation, I argue, open up

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new forms of access to Shakespearean performance, both in the sense of widening audience reach and in expanding the kinds of drama that can be found within a single production.

3.1

From Access to Artistry

In many ways, the National’s breakthrough in 2009 is where the story of digital broadcasting on a global scale begins. And yet, the live broadcasting of theatre did not originate with the digital era: long before the rise of binary code, the technologies of telephone, radio, television, and film were all used to relay live events to audiences distant from the performance venue. This section examines a selection of important moments from that longer history, showing how a project like NT Live emerged out of a more than century-long tradition of using communications technologies to broaden access to the performing arts. By looking at how audiences and critics responded to these earlier initiatives, one can begin to identify key issues that continue to shape debates about theatre broadcasting today. These include questions about whether the technologies used are sophisticated and agile enough to convey the multiple dimensions involved in performance (including sound, image, movement, and duration) and furthermore whether the resulting broadcast can ever generate the feelings of immediacy, intimacy, and eventness so often associated with the experience of live, in-person performance. One of the earliest examples of live relays within the performing arts came from France, where in 1881 Clément Ader invented the ‘théâtrophone’ and released it for commercial use nine years later. Marcel Proust was perhaps its most famous patron: as a subscriber to the service, the novelist listened along at home to the Parisian theatre, opera, and music performances that he was too ill to attend in person (Balme 2008: 80). By 1892, pay-per-use théâtrophones had been installed in one hundred ‘hotels, cafes, restaurants, theatre vestibules’ across the capital (‘The Theatrophone’ 1892: 13758). For fifty centimes every five minutes, curious citizens could use this ‘little apparatus’ to transport themselves to a performance of their choosing (ibid.). The novelist Victor Hugo, another admirer, found the experience of sonically jumping from the Théâtre-Français to the Opéra-Comique in a matter of seconds ‘very strange’ but also rather ‘charming’ (Laster 1983: 75; my translation). While in Hugo’s case the novelty of the théâtrophone seems to have overshadowed its content, it nevertheless allowed him and other fin de

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siècle audiences to begin exploring what it meant to be somewhere, and to experience performance, at a geographical remove. The théâtrophone achieved remarkable success during its brief life, but in the end it was limited by its inability to transmit content beyond sound. ‘Let us hope that the theatrophone will soon be completed by the theatrophote’, one nineteenth-century journalist commented, ‘and that the eye will be able to follow the actors at the same time that the ear hears their words’ (‘The Theatrophone’ 1892: 13759). It would be nearly fifty years before television became an everyday technology in many people’s lives, but when it did it also looked to theatre and the performing arts for material to transmit. ‘In the 1930s and 1940s, television was envisioned primarily as a medium devoted to the transmission of ongoing live events’, and theatre productions featured prominently in such programming (Auslander 2008: 15). For some commentators, the intimacy of television, with its ability to broadcast drama live into viewers’ homes, produced an exciting and even preferable alternative to being in person at a public venue. Television ‘make[s] all the world a stage and every home a front-row seat for sports, drama, and news’, one critic in the 1940s wrote (with a little help from Shakespeare), while another concluded that ‘the audience experience in relation to the performer is similar in television to the performer-audience relationship in the theatre: the audience is in direct contact with the performer at the moment of his “performance”’ (ibid.: 16–17). The immediacy, comfort, and convenience of televised broadcasts were among their most treasured features, with advocates of the medium suggesting that it could ‘simulate the entire experience of being at the theatre’ without actually having to leave one’s home (Spigel 1992: 139). Most broadcasts in the early years of television came from the studio, but a select few were relayed from the theatre itself. John Wyver has identified a handful of Shakespearean productions in the 1930s–50s that were transmitted live from UK theatres either fully or in part. The critic Grace Wyndham Goldie praised these broadcasts for the way they evoked ‘the actual feeling of being in a theatre’, though she also voiced concerns about how watching a production through a series of ‘camera shots’ risked generating ‘very little effect as a whole’ (Wyver 2014: 108–9). The aesthetic integrity of performance, and the intellectual, emotional, and sensory effects it might have on its audience, were inevitably affected— and, in the opinion of some viewers, ultimately diminished—by the transfer from three-dimensional stage to two-dimensional screen.

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Reservations about the artistic impact of filmed theatre, plus the challenge and expense of broadcasting on location, contributed to a long hiatus from the form that took place in the second half of the century. After the 1946 broadcast of Robert Atkins’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, London, there were no live, full-length, televised relays of Shakespeare from a theatre in the UK until BBC Four’s 2003 broadcast of Tim Carroll’s Richard II from the Globe (ibid.: 110). Barely a year old at that time, BBC Four came into being with the advent of digital television and was intended as ‘an intelligent alternative to programmes on the mainstream TV channels’ (Long and Wall 2016: 11). The fact that live theatre broadcasting re-emerged with the development of digital delivery platforms was no coincidence: the agility of digital editing and transmission, along with their relatively modest costs in comparison to analogue predecessors, meant that experiments in live broadcasting became far more feasible in this new era of communications technology. Stephen Purcell has highlighted how central the ‘discourse of “liveness”’ was to the Globe’s Richard II broadcast and the way its producers framed it for television audiences (2014: 213). The presenter Andrew Marr, who introduced the broadcast, repeatedly emphasized the risk involved in relaying it in real time, while interviews with in-person audience members celebrated the festive atmosphere in the theatre and the intimate connection between actors and spectators that occurred in this unique, open-air space. The result, Purcell argues, was a broadcast that worked hard to evoke ‘the experience of “being there”’ for television audiences, even if that was the one thing that was ‘explicitly unavailable’ to them (ibid.: 214). The thrill and affordances of live presence were celebrated for remote viewers in the hopes that they might imagine themselves part of this festive event and contribute to its experiential aliveness. But what about transmissions aimed at larger, collective audiences, which would prove a defining feature of NT Live and other broadcasting programmes in the twenty-first century? The most famous example of such an endeavour can be found in the history of another high-profile Hamlet , directed by John Gielgud in 1964 on Broadway and starring Richard Burton at the height of his fame. Like Benedict Cumberbatch’s production at the Barbican a half-century later, audience demand for the show easily exceeded capacity, leading producers to join forces with a new venture called ‘Electronovision’, which sought to film live events

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for cinema distribution. Backed by Warner Brothers and led by the LAbased film impresario William Sargent—a man said to possess ‘audacity the size of an elephant’—this ‘epoch-making’ Hamlet seemed to herald a new chapter in the relationship between theatre and film (Oliver 2003; ‘Richard Burton Talks Electronovision’ 2007). ‘If this clicks’, a representative of Warner Brothers told The New York Times, ‘Warner could become involved in Broadway play production on a larger scale by filming, comparatively cheaply, in Electronovision and thereafter reap the benefits of an almost built-in audience’ (Weiler 1964). Theatre productions might be shown on a regular basis in cinemas across America and eventually around the world. Although the Electronovision Hamlet was not broadcast live—in fact, it was shown more than a month after the stage production had closed— its producers gave cinema managers careful instructions about how to create a sense of occasion for audiences attending ‘this historic first’ (‘Richard Burton’s Hamlet ’ 2013). ‘[G]ear your thinking to terms of PRESTIGE, IMPORTANCE and STATUS’, the exhibitors’ pack urged, while also providing guidance about how the lobby, ticket booth, and bathrooms should be prepared for the special night (Buchanan 2016: 201–2). Further contributing to a theatrical aura was the project’s emphasis on ephemerality and exclusivity: there would be four simultaneous screenings of the film across the US on 23–4 September only, after which all the reels would be destroyed (an arrangement akin to the one struck a few years later for Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and its filming for Japanese audiences [Wyver 2019: 97]). Happily for posterity, Burton’s widow would find a copy of the footage in their home decades later and authorize its 1995 release on DVD. Perhaps most important of all for the Electronovision project as originally conceived, however, was the idea of ‘immediacy, the sense of being there’, as Burton himself described it in a promotional trailer (‘Richard Burton’s Hamlet ’ 2013). Special tickets created for the cinema screenings avowed that the film would show the production ‘Exactly as presented on the Broadway stage of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre with the same all star cast’, suggesting the value placed on faithfulness to the theatrical experience (Fig. 3.1). Even if temporal liveness could not be achieved, the promise of unity across the live and recorded event presented the screenings as an extension of the theatrical run, infused with the immediacy and kinetic charge of in-person, co-present performance.

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Fig. 3.1 Ticket stub for Richard Burton’s Electronovision Hamlet (1964), directed by John Gielgud for the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre (Owned and photographed by Erin Sullivan)

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Burton’s Hamlet went out to nearly 1,000 cinemas, reaping $3.1 million in sales, but Electronovision ultimately proved too costly and its artistic results too mixed for a regular ‘Theatrofilm’ programme to follow (Leff 1981: 22–3). Technical problems during the recording and postproduction processes led to poor sound quality at times and an ‘overall dimness’ in the visual image, leading to less-than-favourable reviews from critics and a loss of interest from Warner Brothers (ibid.). While Electronovision would be used to film a handful of events in the future, including Richard Pryor’s legendary ‘Live in Concert’ comedy show in 1979, the possibility of a regular series of Broadway features quickly faded from view (ibid.: 28). We now know that it would be many years before Burton’s ‘theatre of the future’ would take shape on a wider scale through sustained broadcasting initiatives (‘Richard Burton’s Hamlet ’ 2013). What changed, of course, was the technology: in 2000, ‘the first viable digital cinema camera was announced’, and as film studios moved away from celluloid, so too did the venues that exhibited their work (Barker 2013: 3). By 2012, more than half of movie screens worldwide had switched to digital projection equipment, and by 2014 a full 90% of US cinemas had followed suit (Radford 2011; Alexander and Blakely 2014). With this transition came a growing network of venues able to receive digital relays, providing projects like NT Live with a ready-made infrastructure for distribution. More than a century after the théâtrophone, performing arts broadcasts had become possible on a regular basis, not just nationally but also around the world. While the National was not the first major arts organization to become involved in broadcasting, it played a central role in establishing theatre as ‘the dominant genre’ in what would eventually become known as ‘event cinema’, as well as the UK as ‘one of the leaders, if not the pre-eminent leader’, in this rapidly evolving industry (Tuck and Abrahams 2015: 2, 19). Several factors contributed to its success: a strong history of cultural programming in the UK, an established network of arts audiences, and the global spread of English all nurtured the reach of NT Live and followon endeavours from the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), Royal Opera House, and British Museum, among others. Perhaps most influential of all, however, was the public funding these organizations had historically received, which over the years had resulted in a more connected infrastructure than in more commercially driven markets, making large-scale platform changes more readily achievable. Such money also came with the

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mandate to provide widespread public access to arts and culture, something that for decades had been accomplished through regional touring and reduced-price tickets for underrepresented groups. Broadcasting presented a further approach, however, that had the potential to reach more people while hopefully also reducing costs for both audiences and theatres. In a 2013 article, Peter Bazalgette, then Chair of Arts Council England, singled out ‘pioneering forms of distribution’ as the most transformative development in twenty-first-century cultural engagement. ‘We are only in the second decade of what is going to be the digital millennium and something very exciting is happening’, he wrote. ‘We’re discovering how to bring more art to more people in more places than we would have even dared imagine a few years ago. This is just the beginning’ (Bazalgette 2013). Such sentiments were echoed in a number of influential publications around the same time: Billington wrote an article celebrating live broadcasts’ potential to ‘democratise theatre’, while the Arts Council’s strategic framework identified the ‘capture, creation, production and distribution of arts and culture through digital technologies and platforms’ as a central priority (Billington 2014; ‘Great Art and Culture’ 2013: 24, 47–8). Across multiple channels, those involved in the arts stressed the benefits of digital technology in terms of scale and scope. More than anything else, digital equalled increased distribution and widened cultural access. No one would object to the aim of sharing publicly funded art with more people, of course, but some did question the overriding equation of digital technology with methods of distribution. ‘There’s a palpable enthusiasm for populist arts broadcasting’, the digital strategist Rachel Coldicutt observed at the time, ‘which stands out amid a more general confusion with the ubiquity of and implications of technology’ (2013). Noting the long history of arts broadcasting, she went on to question the association of ‘things on screen’ with ‘novelty and innovation’ (ibid.). For her, the insistent linking of digital innovation in the arts with broadcasting showed a limited appreciation—and possibly appetite—for the power of technology to reshape creative practice in more radical ways. Live broadcasting, from this point of view, simply takes what already exists and amplifies it, just as television and radio have done since the early twentieth century. It is an essentially conservative art, in both the sense of preserving something that is already there and of maintaining, for the most part, a conventional approach to theatre-making that observes and even intensifies the fourth wall between performers and audiences.

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What often goes unacknowledged in such discussions, however, is the degree of creative interpretation and reinvention involved in filming three-dimensional performances for viewing on two-dimensional screens. Wyver, Producer of the RSC’s Live from Stratford-upon-Avon series, has criticized the long-standing ‘myth of non-mediation’ that surrounds arts broadcasting, which tends to frame such work as neutral capture rather than purposeful adaptation (2014: 109). To an extent, the producers and practitioners involved in major broadcasting projects are themselves responsible for such a view. In the early days of NT Live, Hytner, the National’s Artistic Director at the time, stressed how little directors and actors changed for the broadcast, which they saw as ‘a facsimile of the live performance’ rather than as an independent, creative work in its own right (Cavendish 2010). Directors at the RSC likewise advised their actors not ‘to change or modulate their performances for the cameras’, and even those in charge of filming typically advocated for a philosophy of convergence over one of deviation (Wyver 2015: 294). Stephen Quinn of Digital Theatre, a company that creates and hosts live theatre recordings for online streaming, has stated that his team’s ‘objective is to be invisible to both audience and performers’, while Tim van Someren, a prolific screen director of live broadcasts, has told theatre colleagues that his ‘aim is to film your performance … not shape your performance for film’ (Bennett-Hunter 2016; Trueman 2013). And yet, feedback from both performers and audiences has repeatedly highlighted the difference that filming makes when it comes to the experience of such performances. While most theatres have continued to assert that they do not alter their shows in any significant way for the cameras, many actors have personally acknowledged the modifications they make for these high-stakes, one-off films. ‘[S]ome of the ways you can act on stage … concentration on voice production, diction, clarity, the belly full of sound … empoying those techniques on camera … looks like you’re acting’, Adrian Lester remarked in a discussion about his 2013 performance in Othello for NT Live (2017: 14). ‘On camera, it is better for some things to be so quiet that you make the audience in the cinema lean in’, he added, before detailing some of the ways he made his Othello camerafriendly for the broadcast (ibid.). Along similar lines, Alex Waldmann has explained that he ‘completely’ reworked his performance of Brutus for the filming of the RSC’s 2017 Julius Caesar, transforming it into something much more inward and restrained, while Wyver has observed comparable

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‘modulati[ons]’ in David Tennant’s performance of Richard II for RSC Live’s 2013 broadcast (Sharrock 2018: 98; Stone 2016: 640). Audiences, in turn, have emphasized the profound effect that different camera angles, and especially varying degrees of closeness, have on their engagement with a production. ‘[T]he directed camera actually adds to emotional impact’, one respondent to an early survey about broadcasts commented, while another praised the way that close-up shots allow audiences ‘to see the faces’ and ‘emotions’ of performers, resulting in ‘a far better experience’ (Barker 2013: 63–4). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that as live broadcasts have become increasingly familiar within the performing arts landscape, audiences have come to view them ‘not as a replacement for live [in-person performance], but as a distinct experience’ that ‘“opens up new ways of seeing the art form”’ (‘From Live-toDigital’ 2016: 12, 57). Neither intrinsically better nor worse, broadcasts are dynamic versions of stage productions that mediate—and at times fundamentally reshape—information about the performances they convey. Such mediation is at once a route to widened access to theatre and a form of artistry in its own right. Though screen directors such as Robin Lough, arguably the leading practitioner in the UK, have emphasized that they strive to ‘remain [as] invisible and unacknowledged’ as possible when filming a production, they have also noted the interpretive skill—and implicitly the creative agency—that this complex process involves (Wyver 2015: 296; Hunter 2021: 9). ‘Story-telling is what it’s all about, not coverage’, Lough has explained. ‘How to find the story, and break it down in terms of five or six cameras, but actually make clear what the storyline is in each piece’ (Wyver 2015: 296). Far from being a process in which the camera shots naturally assemble themselves, relaying the production without much outside help, theatre broadcasting relies on the considerable artistic skill of those planning, plotting, creating, and mixing its audio-visual feeds. With such issues in mind, Wyver has proposed the word ‘translation’ as the best way of describing these broadcasts, which retain ‘a strong degree of fidelity to a pre-existing original’ while also involving significant and ‘intentional creative mediation’ (2019: 172). Widened access is of course an important goal, but so is aesthetic achievement in a new medium. From the early days of the théâtrophone to NT Live in our own times, those in the performing arts have repeatedly explored how new technologies might be used to reach larger audiences. Although the experience of sharing the same time and physical space with others has long

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enjoyed central positioning in most definitions of theatre, it has also proved limiting in terms of reaching marginalized audiences, broadening the art form’s appeal, and diversifying revenue streams. With the rise of NT Live and follow-on initiatives, and subsequently with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and venue closures, came a significant shift in the digital distribution of theatre and other performing arts. Part of the ‘new norm’ within the arts landscape, live filming—whether for immediate broadcasting or for later, on-demand viewing—is very likely ‘here to stay’ (Morgan 2021; Armstrong 2021). What remains underappreciated, however, are the artistic techniques and screen grammar that distinguish the filmic storytelling in one broadcast from that of another. The rest of this chapter explores how shot composition, camera angle, pace of editing, and visual proximity dramatically influence the way a broadcast conveys a stage production to remote audiences. Ranging from the theatrical to the televisual to the cinematic, these techniques may not shape theatre for film, as van Someren put it, but they certainly do so through it.

3.2

Framing Performance

In her landmark study of theatre audiences, Susan Bennett proposed that theatrical events take place within not one but two frames. Building on the work of Karen Gaylord, she suggested that the ‘inner frame’ of a production contains ‘the event itself’ and the ‘production strategies, ideological overcoding, and the material conditions of performance’, while the ‘outer frame’ encompasses ‘the idea of the theatrical event’ and the ‘horizon of expectations’ that audiences bring to it (Bennett 1997: 1–2, 139). Live broadcasts are not exempt from this double framing: though audiences do not physically travel to the theatrical venue, pre-show and interval features work to create a sense of place and a feeling of eventness at a distance. What’s more, a case might be made for broadcasts being subject to a third kind of framing: that produced by the artful view of the camera, which relays particular moments of performance while inevitably obscuring and even cutting off others. It is this selective process that has simultaneously proven least visible and most objectionable to broadcast audiences, who often do not register the impact of such choices unless they find them unsatisfying. This section focuses largely on this third form of framing by looking at the opening scenes of three different Shakespearean broadcasts from three

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different UK theatres, each directed for film by Lough. In their varying approaches to how they map performance space and the bodies that exist within it, they reveal notably different understandings of what theatrical presence looks and feels like when it transfers to the screen. Before embarking on that discussion, however, I want to consider the significance of a live broadcast’s outer frame, which introduces audiences to the theatrical event and the venue, ethos, and history that surrounds it. The central function of the material that makes up this frame is to encourage audiences to imagine themselves into a theatrical experience—the idea of theatre, to return to Bennett—and the forms of (a)liveness that attend it. Purcell’s discussion of the Globe/BBC Four broadcast of Richard II demonstrated how prominently the idea of liveness featured in television audiences’ introduction to that project, and Beth Sharrock has likewise shown how the audio-visual paratexts that surround NT Live and RSC Live broadcasts take pains to highlight ‘the performance’s “presentness”’ (Sharrock 2020: 56, 68). While producers of broadcasts explicitly script much of this framing, they also relay it non-verbally through techniques such as the presentation of live footage of theatre spectators chatting and taking their seats. In many broadcasts, natural sound from the auditorium also plays for cinema audiences even when the picture switches to advertisements for upcoming screenings or rehearsal photographs from the production about to begin. In the fifteen minutes or so leading up to the start of the performance, remote audiences are invited to mix visually and sonically with their in-house counterparts, and ideally to merge into one. Occasionally transmissions begin by moving swiftly into the production itself, but more often they start with five to ten minutes of introductory interviews, discussions, and documentary footage. While these opening materials can sometimes feel overly directed in the way they guide audiences towards a particular understanding of the play about to come, reflecting ‘an anxiety over reception’ and a wish ‘to ensure interpretation is as homogenous as possible’, they can also perform useful work in terms of introducing remote viewers to the space, place, and story of a venue (Kirwan 2014: 276). Archival footage of 1950s Stratford-upon-Avon played before RSC Live’s 2013 inaugural broadcast of Richard II , directed by Gregory Doran; a short documentary before Josie Rourke’s 2014 Coriolanus explored the history and theatrical intimacy of the Donmar Warehouse; and the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company (KBTC) included a sequence that guided cinema audiences for

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its 2015 The Winter’s Tale and 2016 Romeo and Juliet from the sidewalk outside of the Garrick Theatre in London into its welcoming lobby and finally towards a plush seat in the dress circle. In each case, such framing contributes to what Janice Wardle has called ‘the creation of a distinctive and performed public space’ (2014: 138). It takes what could be a fairly abstracted notion of a distant performance venue and strives to give it a local habitation and a name. It is all the more notable, then, that when these broadcasts complete their runs at cinemas and transfer to DVDs, streaming platforms, and theatre archives, most of this framing material disappears. Like the malleable early modern prologues that Tiffany Stern has argued were written, adapted, and freely cut for specific performances, broadcast paratexts in the twenty-first century are more connected to the time-limited event than the recording that continues on after it (2009: 82). Unlike NT Live, the RSC’s broadcasting programme always included follow-on DVD distribution as part of its model, with some of the mini-documentaries and interviews that make up its broadcasts’ outer frames reappearing as DVD extras. As its catalogue has moved onto educational and commercial streaming platforms, however, these framing materials have further slipped away, with new guides—usually textual—appearing in their place. The same is true of NT Live, whose producers long resisted calls for ondemand access before relenting in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and creating their own streaming platform, NT Live at Home. With the change in relation between the audience and performance comes a change in outer frame: the experiential event becomes more akin to accessing a film or television series, even as the aesthetic object at its core remains rooted in the theatre. Which brings me to a broadcast’s inner frame, and the pivotal work screen directors and their teams do as they decide how to tell the story of a stage production through film. A central concern in many discussions of live broadcasting is the way the camera directs the spectator’s gaze, and in doing so disrupts their ability to look at different parts of the stage. ‘[Y]ou are confined to what the cameraman wants you to see’, one respondent to a 2016 Arts Council survey about broadcasts noted, while others have lamented moments of what they perceive to be ‘inept camerawork’ or the feeling that they are ‘“at the mercy” of others’ (‘From Live-to-Digital’ 2016: 60; Barker 2013: 68). For scholars Bernadette Cochrane and Frances Bonner, the imposition of the camera frame unsettles ‘the primary virtue of the live experience’, which they characterize

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as ‘the ability, indeed the right, of each audience member to select and compile his or her own edit of the proceedings’ (2014: 127). Watching performance on a screen, such critiques suggest, reduces the experience of theatre by limiting the audience’s agency. For those on the opposite side of the debate, however, such a ‘discourse … centred on loss’ simultaneously overestimates how much theatre audiences avail themselves of ‘the unfettered freedom to look’ and underestimates a broadcast’s ability to create a vivid sense of threedimensional drama through varied, dynamic camerawork (Wyver 2014: 117–18). Alison Stone has posited that the view available in a broadcast ‘exceeds’ that of ‘the fixed-point view from any one seat’, while Wyver has suggested that broadcasts interpret performance afresh through a mixture of theatrical, televisual, and cinematic modes of presentation (Stone 2016: 632; Wyver 2014: 105–6). Theatrical shots, Wyver explains, tend to be wider and longer, televisual ones more closely cropped and rapidly edited, and cinematic views more visually spectacular and technically complex (2014: 105–6). Most broadcasts feature a combination of at least the theatrical and the televisual—and if they can afford it, the cinematic too— but they vary in the ways they shift between these modes and the extent to which they favour one over another. Such creative choices are, of course, dependent on the recording equipment broadcast teams have at their disposal, as well as the budget that underpins their endeavours. High-end broadcasts created by the National, RSC, KBTC, and other well-resourced institutions typically involve six or seven cameras stationed throughout the theatre auditorium, and cost anywhere from £150,000 to £500,000 to produce (Trueman 2013; ‘From Live-to-Digital’ 2016: 40, 117). Two or three cameras are usually placed on tracks in the centre and side stalls, allowing them to dolly about 1.5 metres left-to-right while also zooming and pivoting. Another is mounted on a crane stationed in the centre stalls, from whence it can extend over and into the stage space and create dramatic panning shots (Aebischer 2020: 160; Wyver 2015: 293, 2019: 172). Other stationary cameras are sometimes located at the back of the stalls or in the circle, and over one hundred microphones capture sound from the actors, musicians, and audience members positioned throughout the auditorium (Wyver 2019: 172). Such equipment provides screen directors with a wealth of visual and audio material that they mix together in real time—first in rehearsals and then on the night of the broadcast—as they produce their own version of what Burton’s contemporaries called ‘instant movies’ (Leff

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1981: 21). In such contexts, they necessarily make careful, purposeful decisions about how to present the world of the stage to remote audiences and create an experience of immersive, theatrical presence. Looking at the opening minutes of a few broadcasts makes visible, in more specific detail, the impact of such choices in practice. In the RSC’s Richard II , for instance, Lough established the scenic landscape of Doran’s production with a dramatically cinematic opening sequence. Starting with a tightly composed aerial shot of Jane Lapotaire’s Duchess of Gloucester collapsed over the shrouded coffin of her husband, the crane-mounted camera pulled slowly back into the downstage space of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST), until the edges of its thrust stage and the first fringes of the audience’s faces came into view (Fig. 3.2). Pausing here, the broadcast image offered viewers a straight-on picture of the entire stage, including the image of a church nave projected onto its backdrop and the dozen or so actors assembled for this opening funeral, which does not occur in Shakespeare’s text. Throughout the scene, which soon turned into the argument between Bolingbroke (Nigel Lindsay) and Mowbray (Antony Byrne) that constitutes most of Act One, scene one, the broadcast view rotated between more tightly framed one- and twoshots of the characters who were speaking and looser shots of the wider stage space as seen from different perspectives around the auditorium. Such an open and mixed perspective is not always present in broadcasts, even when they are created by the same screen director. Lough’s transmission of Hytner’s 2013 Othello for the National, for example, began in darkness with the sound of an electric guitar pulsing, before opening on a brief, high-angled shot of the stage. The picture then quickly switched to a camera looking in at the actors sharply from stage left, almost as if it were situated in the wings. From here it gradually zoomed in on the central characters, Iago (Rory Kinnear) and Roderigo (Tom Robertson), as they lambasted Othello’s recent promotion of Cassio. Throughout this three-minute exchange, the visuals remained tightly focused. Though the picture moved across several of the broadcast’s seven cameras, often providing a slowed-down version of shot-reverse-shot sequencing—that is, a shot of the speaker looking towards the listener, followed by a shot of the listener looking towards the speaker—it typically cropped the two actors at their chests and always kept them centrally in view (Fig. 3.3). The wider stage picture was implied through the windows and pub sign visible behind these actors, but a clear, full shot of the scene never appeared.

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Fig. 3.2 The Duchess of Gloucester (Jane Lapotaire) at her husband’s coffin as The Queen (Emma Hamilton) looks on in the opening moments of the broadcast of Richard II (2013), directed for the stage by Gregory Doran and for the screen by Robin Lough for the Royal Shakespeare Company (Screenshot)

The implications of such differences in style are significant, especially if sustained throughout a broadcast. Which approach an audience member will prefer is ultimately a matter of taste, but each establishes a distinctive visual mode that moves towards markedly different forms of spectatorial and actorly presence. The closer, more tightly cropped style of Othello

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Fig. 3.3 Iago (Rory Kinnear) and Roderigo (Tom Robertson) in the opening moments of the broadcast of Othello (2013), directed for the stage by Nicholas Hytner and for the screen by Robin Lough for the National Theatre (Screenshots)

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follows a screen grammar familiar from film and especially television, in which constant proximity to actors’ bodies and faces is the norm. Through this mode the viewer becomes a tacit member of the conversation depicted, with the visual frame of reference approximating someone’s natural field of vision were they part of the discussion. It is an intimate, inclusive, and people-centric point of view, offering free access to the nuances of facial expressions and other markers of psychological inwardness. Pascale Aebischer has argued that such an approach is especially prevalent in NT Live broadcasts, which she describes as ‘illusionist’ due to the way they crop out the wider theatrical scene, including the in-person audience, and place remote viewers within the ‘spatially extended’ world of the production (2018b: 122). For many, such immediacy is the primary means by which broadcasts can surpass in-person theatre. ‘The advantage is you can really see the actors, the expressions on their faces, acting even with their eyelids … which you would never see if you went to the National’, one spectator commented in the Arts Council’s 2016 survey (‘From Live-to-Digital’ 2016: 60). Likewise, in Martin Barker’s research into opera broadcasts, one respondent noted that watching on screen is ‘Better because you’re practically there on stage with the singers rather than seeing them from some distance in a live theatre’ (2013: 63). Sequences like the one at the start of Othello help create this feeling of immersion by constantly directing the audience’s energy and attention towards the central actors speaking. Though the picture frame might pull out slightly at times, it always circles back in again, hovering around this fixed point of focus and producing a centripetal form of spectatorship. Such an observation partly echoes Sarah Bay-Cheng’s account of screen drama as an ‘introverted (pulling away from us)’ kind of art and theatre as an ‘extroverted (coming towards us)’ sort of one (2007: 42). Bay-Cheng’s prescient study, published two years before the debut of NT Live, considers ‘why many recorded versions of theatre seem so anaemic compared to their live performances’ (ibid.: 43). The main problem, she suggests, is that the camera provides a largely static, whole-stage view that does not ‘penetrate’ the action and usher the viewer in: ‘With nothing pulling us in and the performance now retreating from us, the screen version can appear lifeless and stale’ (ibid.) Within five years, the situation had changed considerably; in broadcasts like this Othello, the camera constantly broke into the playing space. The result was not so much that the optical view of the performance was ‘retreating’ from the camera

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frame, but rather that those cameras were pushing the audience forcefully into the scene. For those who relish this close, people-centric mode of spectatorship, the result is an enhanced sense of intimacy with the actors and immersion in the action. For those who do not, the effect is more claustrophobic than anaemic. The opening of Richard II , in contrast, offered a much more open and outward approach to displaying theatrical space. The RST’s thrust stage accounts in part for this mode: with actors positioned in front of one another and audience members on three sides, individually framed shots against an empty backdrop can be harder to come by, and the spatial depth of the blocking can also mean that a wider view is needed to capture all its layers. That said, televisual mid-shots still featured prominently in the broadcast’s presentation of the scene’s back-and-forth dialogue, though frequent wide shots of the collective stage space—‘so necessary for theatrical communication’, Gay McAuley has argued—offset their inward pull (1994: 191). Each visual cut into the stage was counterbalanced by an eventual shift back, producing a more sweeping, if not quite centrifugal, way of seeing. While the broadcast sequence still heavily directed the audience’s gaze, the object of its focus was more varied: inward shots of actors’ faces gave way to outward views of the entire stage, and glimpses of in-house audience members also appeared. The result was a more typically theatrical point of view, punctuated with cinematic flourishes, in which a close focus on individual performers was underpinned by a steady awareness of the space surrounding them. In this approach to filming, actors are tracked and mapped by the camera rather than firmly fixed within it, enabling a more mobile form of spectatorship that attends to movement through space as well as physical and psychological proximity. More tightly cropped shots, in contrast, locate actors’ bodies firmly within the limits of the camera frame, imposing stasis on a moment that in the theatre is less bounded and more alive with possibility. While actors might not end up running across the stage at a moment’s notice, or falling suddenly and dramatically to the ground, there is still a sense in the theatre that they could. The more open and fluid camerawork used in the opening of Richard II allowed the stage composition to retain greater priority and coherence, with the theatrical mise-en-scène encompassing, rather than being overridden by, the cropped perspective of the more filmic close up. Live recordings from the Globe, which from 2009–15 were created by filming a production on two nights and making a composite edit of the

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best takes for the final release, offer an interesting counterpoint to the two approaches discussed thus far. While the Globe on Screen’s mode of production was arguably more mediated, its style of filming resulted in the most open and theatrical presentations of all. Unlike live broadcasts from the National and RSC, these recordings rarely involved cameras on cranes, which are not only costly but also require considerable space to operate. Instead, two cameras located in the sides of the yard, two in the back of the lower gallery, and one in the middle gallery enabled a variety of stage views that cut across the theatre from different angles and almost always included the audience. The Globe’s use of minimal set pieces and shared light in its outdoor productions also meant that much less had to be done to accommodate staging and lighting designs (at least until 2016, when a lighting rig was temporarily introduced). Although the cameras had to recalibrate as the evening sun went down and artificial flood lights came on, the stage they filmed was, on the whole, evenly lit and relatively unobstructed by mobile set pieces. The result was a more continuous, and consequently theatrical, approach to representing performance on screen. Take, for instance, the opening of Jonathan Munby’s 2015 The Merchant of Venice, starring Jonathan Pryce and again directed for screen by Lough, which began with a wide shot of not just the Globe stage but also hundreds of audience members packed tightly in front of it in the theatre’s standing yard (Fig. 3.4). From here the camera cut steadily across a number of views as it observed the pre-show festivities and eventually the fighting that served as a prelude to this production. When Antonio (Dominic Mafham) at last took his place and delivered the opening lines of the play, the frame of vision returned to a wide, straighton shot of the stage, groundlings again in view, and then inched slowly in towards the actors as they performed the scene. Cutting gently in from the left, and then later from the right, the camera always kept the audience in sight as it traced the outlines of this very particular playing space. The presence of the audience throughout the opening scene—and indeed during most of the ensuing film—meant that the theatrical context of the performance was never lost for remote viewers. Occasionally the most close-up and straight-on shots did frame the actors against the stage’s backdrop or darkened wings, temporarily omitting the audience, but such moments were brief and always returned to a wider, audience-oriented perspective. Just as significant in terms of theatricality was the stable and open way in which the Globe’s performance space unfolded in these opening

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Fig. 3.4 Solanio (Regé-Jean Page), Antonio (Dominic Mafham), and Salarino (Brian Martin) in the opening moments of the recording of The Merchant of Venice (2015), directed for the stage by Jonathan Munby and for the screen by Robin Lough for Shakespeare’s Globe (Screenshots)

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minutes. Here the presentation of the theatre remained continuous rather than broken-up or zoned, meaning that the relationship between different parts of the stage or between actors and audience was never seriously in question. As in the Richard II broadcast, Lough repeatedly returned to wide shots of the full scene to convey the overall stage picture, as well as the framework of the Globe theatre itself. But in contrast to Richard II and especially Othello, waist-up shots were used much more sparingly. The effect on spectatorship was neither particularly centripetal nor centrifugal: with the geography of performance and reception clearly mapped, remote audiences possessed a level of spatial awareness that was comparable, if never exactly identical, to that of their in-house counterparts. In this sense Lough’s Merchant adhered most closely to the ‘irreducible distinction’ that Susan Sontag once made between theatre and cinema: ‘Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space’, while cinema thrives on its ‘alogical or discontinuous ’ presentation (1966: 29). The kind of presence created for screen spectators is one that is deeply attuned to the use of space in the theatre and the movement of actors within it. In the opening moments of these three productions—performed at three different theatres but filmed by the same director for screen—one can see both the continuities and differences that make every broadcast a distinctive performance in its own right. While all three screen translations moved between wider and tighter shots, relaying the mise-en-scène of the stage as well as close ups of the performers within it, they varied as to which view they preferred and the steps they took to arrive at it. Some of these differences can be attributed to theatrical architecture, production equipment, and the limits they impose on filming teams, but the creative agency and skill of screen directors and their crew cannot be dismissed. In each case, their work literally framed the stage performance on display, telling a story about the production itself and the kinds of dramatic experience available within it.

3.3

Zoning Space, Zoning Emotion

Once live broadcasts are underway and their venues and stages introduced, it is up to the director for screen to decide what sort of filmography will predominate for the rest of the show. The Globe’s Merchant continued much as it began, adopting a filming style that’s not dissimilar to the theatre’s typical approach to playing: clear, measured, technically

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spare, simple but hopefully not simplistic. With its more or less fixed backdrop, fluid scene changes, few set pieces, and even lighting, the Globe stage offers a stable and rooted mise-en-scène that benefits from a similarly even form of camerawork. Since 2016, the Globe has broadcast live, either online or to cinemas, but its style of filming has remained largely ‘presentational’—a word Aebischer has used to describe the clear, observational, and at times reserved quality of Globe on Screen transmissions (2018b: 123). Broadcast teams at the National, RSC, and KBTC work to rather different requirements, with more variable stage spaces, more elaborate equipment, and longer preparation periods often generating more conspicuously televisual and filmic results. Here the production process usually includes detailed discussions between the broadcast and stage teams, one or two full camera rehearsals, and the opportunity to script around seven to eight hundred shots in advance.2 Such conditions allow screen directors to opt for a more intensely edited and visually guided style of filmmaking, should they wish, which as I have shown often crops the camera frame more closely around key actors and jumps from character to character in order to create an enhanced sense of intimacy and intensity. One drawback of this approach, however, is the way that it splits the stage into a series of visually disconnected zones that can be challenging for remote audiences to imagine back together. The result is a more decisive move away from traditionally theatrical modes of spectatorship and the experiences of presence they generate. Almost every broadcast contains at least one example of camerawork that closes in on a particular aspect of performance and, in doing so, causes some confusion about how that moment relates to the production as a whole. In Lough’s 2010 Hamlet for NT Live, directed by Hytner and starring Kinnear, a close up on Hamlet for the entire ‘To be, or not to be’ speech meant that cinema audiences could not tell at what point Ruth Negga’s Ophelia had joined the scene (3.1.58). In Branagh’s 2013 Macbeth, staged in a deconsecrated church in Manchester and filmed by van Someren for NT Live, the introduction of the witches in close up as they burst through a shuttered frame offered cinema viewers scant information as to where to locate them within this unusual playing space. Likewise, in Lough’s 2014 broadcast of King Lear for NT Live, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Simon Russell Beale, quick cutting between the characters in the storm made it difficult to understand where on the darkened stage each person was placed. Individually,

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these moments proved minor obstructions in their respective broadcasts, but taken together they start to illustrate how more tightly cropped approaches to filming can disrupt forms of spectatorship that attend to space as well as actors. As the geography of performance is increasingly cut up and zoned, audiences’ ways of seeing and understanding must change as well. They must either fill in the gaps imaginatively or relinquish the impulse to chart a continuous sense of space. Ann M. Martinez has written persuasively on the latter possibility, exploring the affordances of a ‘new fluid digital stage’ that the camera ‘compartmentalizes … into various interconnected smaller parts’ (2018: 201–2). For her, broadcasting at its best enables a more intense form of spectatorship that is not bound by the fixities of geography. ‘There is no longer a front, back, or a side to the stage’, she writes; ‘Instead there are degrees of distance’ (ibid.: 201). The stage from this point of view becomes less rooted and more relational, with geography being calibrated through characters’ emotional arcs rather than through the units of space between them. The camera’s zoning of the stage paradoxically allows for a de-zoning of the auditorium: audiences are released from hierarchical seating plans and instead allowed to experience the production from multiple vantage points. The result, Martinez argues, is an ‘omniscient’ form of spectatorship that allows audiences to watch not just from different seats in the house, but from parts of the stage that have hitherto been off limits (ibid.). For her, these perspectives bring with them new understanding, which has the potential to absorb the spectator even more fully than the live, in-person experience. Martinez’s chief example, the Donmar Warehouse’s 2014 broadcast of Coriolanus , starring Tom Hiddleston and filmed by van Someren for NT Live, illustrated how the zoning of performance might occur even in small, intimate theatres. In the cases of King Lear, Hamlet , and Macbeth, one reason for the camerawork described above was the challenge of filming on vast or unconventional stages. Indeed, Sarah Waterman has gone as far as to suggest that broadcasts of performances in the National’s 1,150-seat Olivier Theatre are particularly problematic, since ‘The camera is just not able to take in the epic scale of that stage and the sensory feast that the live spectator receives’ (2020: 205). In the Donmar’s 251-seat black-box theatre, however, characters and audience members are rarely more than a few metres apart, in principle enabling a more joined-up presentation of the performance space. And yet, for this Coriolanus , van Someren’s broadcast made heavy use of close ups and cutting, frequently

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offering alternating one-shots of a pair of speakers even when they were positioned right next to one another on stage. A prime example of this was Volumnia and Virgilia’s sewing scene (Act One, scene three), which featured the two women seated side-by-side (played by Deborah Findlay and Birgitte Hjort Sørensen). The camera first showed a full, straight-on shot of them together, before moving through a series of tighter, side-long headshots of each individually. The pair’s opening exchange, which in this production ran to about two minutes and included all twenty-five lines of prose from Shakespeare’s text, was presented through eighteen different shots, meaning that on average the camera cut every six to seven seconds or one to two lines. The result was a very mobile and directed form of spectatorship that sculpted new points of access into what was, on the stage, a relatively stationary scene. While such rapidity of cutting is not at all unusual in television or film—in fact, such a pace would likely seem a bit slow—in the theatre it marks a major break from how audiences have traditionally watched and apprehended performance. As Bay-Cheng has reminded us, ‘editing has no true visual parallel in the theatre’, and the faster screen directors cut between different views, the further their broadcasts depart from more traditionally theatrical forms of storytelling and presence (2007: 46). Through frequent editing, characters are not only seen up close, but from a variety of angles that fragment the actor’s body into a series of images that the viewer collects and mentally layers together. This was especially true in the production’s most emotionally charged sequences, including the arguments leading up to Coriolanus’s banishment in Act Three and the final meeting between him and his family in Act Five. In these, the camera moved between multi-angled midshots of characters shouting and crying, producing particularly intense viewing experiences that located screen spectators in the middle of the on-stage action. In Act Three, for instance, the screen view cut between the tribunes, citizens, Menenius (Mark Gatiss), and Coriolanus as they argued with increasing vehemence about the lawfulness of the latter’s actions. When Sicinia (Helen Schlesinger) and Brutus (Elliot Levey) at last called for Coriolanus’s banishment, declaring him an ‘enemy to the people and his country’, van Someren jumped to a high-angled, full-stage shot before closing back in on the Roman general as he bellowed, ‘You common cry of curs!’ (3.3.124). From here the frame switched to a headand-shoulders shot of Coriolanus castigating his accusers, tears visibly glistening in his eyes, and then to a different view of him every few lines

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from a new vantage point, usually close up. The effect was less one of watching the scene from multiple seats in the Donmar, and more one of seeing it, almost prismatically, from the perspectives of multiple characters on the stage. This sustained focus on Coriolanus adhered to a convention in filmed theatre of keeping the camera on the speaker, even if it means omitting the reactions of others on stage. Hiddleston’s celebrity arguably determined such a focus even further, with broadcast audiences receiving ample opportunity to gaze at this Hollywood star, who had recently been dubbed the ‘sexiest man in the world’ by MTV viewers (an accolade that the broadcast’s presenter, Emma Freud, highlighted during the interval). Anna Blackwell has shown how Hiddleston’s wounded body became ‘a complex erotic spectacle’ in this production, particularly during an interpolated shower scene that followed Act One’s battle in Corioli (2014: 349). Along similar lines, the actor’s performance of emotional vulnerability proved an object of fixation and even desire in the broadcast’s final act, when the camera stayed with him even as other characters, particularly his mother, pleaded with him to give up his assault on Rome. As Volumnia’s impassioned speech steadily eroded Coriolanus’s stoic resolve, the camera continually cut back to his grief-stricken face, wet with tears. In these moments, the subtleties of Hiddleston’s performance—the slight squint of an eye, the trembling in his lips—became legible for remote audiences in a way that was impossible for in-person spectators, even in a theatre as small as the Donmar. The fact that Hiddleston was a skilled film actor clearly influenced the creative team. In an interview about the broadcast, Rourke recalled how she encouraged van Someren ‘to come in closer on’ Hiddleston and capture as much detail as possible (Friedman 2016: 478). ‘For his age, Tom is an incredibly experienced screen actor’, she explained, ‘and [he] knows how to modulate performance. He is always acting in close-up’ (ibid.). From this point of view, the camera simply made the most of a style of acting that was already on display in the stage version, foregrounding the nuances of Hiddleston’s performance and drawing remote audiences even further into his particularly emotional Coriolanus. The fact that it allowed more intimate access to Hiddleston the star actor, in terms of both bodily presence and psychological depth, was an added benefit. It’s understandable, of course, that directors will want to privilege closeness to actors in theatre broadcasts, especially when a high-profile performer is involved. But it’s also important to consider the impact that

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such close ups and cutting have on an audience’s experience of presence. For the British film director Steve McQueen, known for his use of extremely long, stationary takes, frequent cutting between more tightly framed shots produces a very different way of watching and responding to screen drama. In response to a question about a seventeen-and-a-halfminute-long shot in his 2008 film Hunger, he described how filmed dialogue that is divided into individual close ups and reverse-angle shots projects the meeting point of the exchange into the minds of the audience, so that ‘the conversation is not with the two people having the conversation’ but rather ‘with the audience’ (‘Steve McQueen’ 2014). The more stationary wide shot, in contrast, locates the dialogue ‘with the two people’ speaking it, meaning that the audience must ‘lean in more, and listen more carefully’: essentially, that they must project themselves into the scene, rather than expecting a more centripetal kind of camerawork to yoke them into it. For McQueen, this approach to filming creates a greater sense of shared presence between action and reception. When a director ‘obliterate[s] the frame’, the audience is forced to be ‘present with that image’ and to experience its characters as they are, in both space and time (‘Obliterating the Frame’ 2014). His comments as a practitioner echo those of André Bazin as a critic, who in the mid-twentieth century argued that long takes produce a ‘deliberately abstract mode of storytelling’ that compels spectators to look into, rather than at, a filmic image (1967: 36). Instead of ‘chopping the world up into little fragments’ and ‘dissolv[ing] it into cinema’, such shots for Bazin mirror the inscrutable and prismatic ‘continuum of reality’, which demands that observers attend nimbly to its multiple sources of meaning (ibid.: 38, 84). Watching in such cases is most certainly a verb, and a very active one at that. An extreme example of Shakespeare broadcasting that tested the power of the long, stationary shot and the kind of watching it engenders was Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare, which in 2015 was streamed online from the Berliner Festspiele over the course of nine evenings. This wasn’t the first time that the UK-based theatre company had experimented with at-home broadcasts. As early as 2008, a year after the debut of the iPhone and a year before the launch of NT Live, Forced Entertainment had streamed its six-hour show, Speak Bitterness, which presented audiences with a series of confessions that range from amusingly trivial to distressingly severe. Since then, the company has continued to explore how online spectatorship might complement,

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rather than detract from, the kinds of long-form, durational performance that interests its members most. With viewers watching from home, surrounded by their own ‘social space and everyday routines and activities’, their attention can both wander and refocus in very personal, even idiosyncratic ways, creating an ambient form of theatre that is simultaneously aloof and affective (Etchells 2015). For Table Top Shakespeare, directed by Tim Etchells, members of the company took turns sitting alone behind a table and narrating the plot of one of Shakespeare’s plays for about fifty minutes each. As the actors recounted these ‘gently comic … condensed versions’, they used household items such as tubes of toothpaste, metal beakers, and cans of beer to represent the characters whose stories they were telling (‘Complete Works’ 2021). During the multi-day livestream of the project, which featured four plays each night, a single, stationary camera relayed an image of the table-turned-stage straight-on, giving remote audiences a direct and unchanging view of each actor (Fig. 3.5). This meant that, in stark contrast to the other broadcasts discussed so far, the camera in Table Top Shakespeare never cut or moved, aside from very minor adjustments. Instead, the view remained steady, spare, and at times remarkably intense. The longer viewers watched one of these installments undistracted, the more the sparseness of its storytelling—in terms of both dramaturgy and camerawork—focused their attention on the minutely evolving dynamics between actor, prop, and stage. In Jerry Killick’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, the character of Lysander—represented by a tall, white, conical vase—came suddenly and amusingly to life as he awoke and fell desperately in love with Helena. As Killick narrated this energetic scene, he slowly tilted the vase up from its side to the very edge of its base (it was sleeping, after all), before swiftly righting it onto the table and causing it to reverberate with seeming delight. Through such a ‘lo-fi’, even ‘reluctant puppetry’, the production foregrounded not only the power of the imagination but also its delicate entanglement with attention (Etchells 2015). Focusing intently, even for just a few moments, was part of the arrestingly ‘mesmeric’ process that animated these mundane household objects, charging them with a sense of identity and anthropomorphic purpose (Collins-Hughes 2018). Of course, the fact that the camera view never changed during this relatively niche, online broadcast was a consequence of necessity as much as art. It is vastly cheaper to run a single camera as opposed to a full

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Fig. 3.5 The camera view for the livestream of Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare (2016), directed by Tim Etchells for Forced Entertainment and featuring Cathy Naden performing The Winter’s Tale (Screenshot)

production team, and zooming in on an inanimate salt and pepper shaker wouldn’t have quite the same effect as cutting to a star actor’s expression of anguish or rage. But aesthetically there was also surprising power in being invited to look, unbroken, at a series of curious events happening slowly before you. With all the performers dressed in casual, black shirts and positioned in front of a dark, reddish curtain, there was very little to distract the remote audience member’s eye away from the narrators at the centre of the frame and the objects they were carefully arranging on the table below. While the in-person show, which subsequently toured to the Barbican in London in 2016, was similarly spare, it nevertheless offered more opportunities for visual distraction through the collection of objects/cast members situated on shelves to the left and right of the stage, as well as the other audience members occupying the black-box space. The streamed version, in contrast, cut all this information out, fixing the remote audience members’ view exclusively on the table top stage and inviting them to consider how, within this wooden O of sorts, a group of seemingly inert players might be coaxed into life. When Killick recounted Titania’s love at first sight for Bottom, for instance, the audience watched as a slender bottle of gin (Titania) slid closer to a sturdy glass jar with two bristly paintbrushes sticking out from

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it (Bottom and his donkey ears). ‘And she says—pretty much straightaway—she says, “Look I… I love you”’, Killick haltingly explained, before recounting Bottom’s nervous response: ‘Well, I… I don’t see you’ve got much reason for that, really’. The unchanging camera view allowed and even invited spectators to flit their gaze back and forth between these everyday objects and Killick the narrator, whose low-key and yet touching style of delivery gradually imbued this collection of bottles and jars with an emotional life of their own. The process of attending to the objects, and then the narrator, and then the objects again had an iterative effect, with the gap between the human and the inanimate narrowing as the eye—and the imagination—progressively brought their presences together. Like the concept for the production itself, Table Top Shakespeare’s single-shot broadcast certainly engaged in Bazin’s ‘deliberately abstract mode of storytelling’, challenging viewers to attend to and make sense of the events unfolding before them. And while the explicitly emotional charge of the performance was nowhere as extreme as Rourke’s Coriolanus , it was in other ways even more affective in its insistence on imaginative collaboration with its audiences, whether they were watching in person or through a screen. In both cases, decisions about whether or not to cut, and whether or not to zoom in, fundamentally shaped the kind of emotional and intellectual experience available to remote spectators. Whereas van Someren’s broadcast of Coriolanus privileged visual proximity and variety, creating new and arguably more immersive points of access for screen spectators, Table Top Shakespeare’s stream highlighted the unexpected power of stillness, which can stir the spectator to attention in its own way. In these two, highly contrasting examples, the geography of performance and its emotional impact could hardly have been more different. In the first, distance was something to be overcome, with the camera cutting up and rezoning theatrical space in a way that enabled visual closeness—and by association emotional closeness too. In the second, a continuous presentation of space invited spectators to locate affinity in unexpected places, positioning them as co-creators within, rather than as witnesses to, the project’s eccentric yet surprisingly affective approach to dramatic storytelling.

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3.4

Hybrid Forms

While the initial ambition for NT Live and follow-on broadcast programmes was to offer something as similar to the theatrical performance as possible, more than a decade’s worth of practice has revealed that the camera will always bring something additional to what is there on stage—even when that camera doesn’t move at all. In some instances that difference might be considered a weakness, leading to the secondrate viewing experience that many theatre-lovers have feared, but at other times it can in fact prove an asset, focusing the audience’s attention in new ways and eliciting emotional and intellectual responses that are related to and yet distinct from those available in person. The particularity of broadcast theatre, and the kind of spectatorship it enables, has led some scholars and practitioners to argue that it must be considered a new genre in its own right—that it is a distinctive, ‘hybrid form’, governed by ‘its own standards and conventions’ (Wyver 2015: 299; Friedman 2016: 479). Many broadcast teams have tacitly embraced this hybridity, mixing more continuous and thereby theatrical approaches to filming with more heavily cut and thereby televisual or cinematic modes. While the more directed camera gaze disrupts remote spectators’ ability to look at different points of interest in a scene, it simultaneously enables forms of access not possible when attending theatre in person. This final section considers the ways in which such hybridity has become an increasingly prominent part of live broadcasting and recording as the form has matured. While some critics have worried that such a trend might corrupt the originary integrity of theatre, in their most accomplished moments these films showcase the aesthetic power of the stage as seen through, and intensified by, the affordances of the screen. As I have demonstrated, one of the chief ways that live broadcasts and films introduce televisual and cinematic hybridity is through the use of poignant close ups that highlight dramatic meaning. In Lough’s filming of Munby’s Merchant of Venice at the Globe, for instance, he shifted away from the open and presentational aesthetic that characterized most of the film in order to emphasize Shylock’s anguish in the production’s final, interpolated scene. Here audiences witnessed Shylock’s forced conversion to Christianity, with the camera slowly and steadily moving from a wide shot of the entire stage, groundlings in view, to a head-and-shoulders view of a trembling, gasping Pryce as a priest poured baptismal waters over his face.

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Such camerawork accentuated the emotional and ethical impact of this final scene, and in particular the power of Pryce’s star performance, which critics described as ‘towering’, ‘deeply moving’, and defined by ‘persecuted vulnerability’ (Stasio 2016; Isherwood 2016; Kellaway 2015). In this sense, it lived up to Michael Friedman’s definition of a successful broadcast as one that ‘enhances the viewer’s perception of the original production’s impact by continuously guiding [them] into a position to apprehend the stage director’s vision’ (2016: 470). In the closing moments of this Merchant, the locus of the drama was essentially Pryce himself, and the narrowing of the camera frame reflected this. By offering a very close, straight-on view of Pryce’s face—a perspective not strictly available to any audience member in the theatre—the recording drew on the capabilities of film to underscore and arguably enhance what was happening in the theatre. While the filmic hybridity of this scene illustrates how live recordings and broadcasts can accentuate theatrical performance, other examples show how such mediation can arguably save it. In the RSC’s 2015 production of Othello, directed by Iqbal Khan, Hugh Quarshie’s decision to portray Othello as ‘a calm, unflappable elder statesman’, guided by cool reason rather than explosive passion, meant that his murder of Desdemona (Joanna Vanderham) in the final scene came across to some audiences in the theatre as ‘sluggish’ and even ‘flat’ (Cowie 2015; Shuttleworth 2015). Indeed, on certain nights his Othello’s seemingly affectless communication that he intended to kill Desdemona ‘presently’ prompted nervous laughter from the in-house audience (5.2.57). In the broadcast, however, again directed by Lough, the emotional depths of Quarshie’s quiet and contained performance became much more intelligible. Here, small movements in his eyes and strain in his brows registered clearly and painfully, relaying the anguish that accompanied this final, violent act. A moment that seemed like a misstep in the theatre found new life on screen. The emphasis and clarification that different forms of camerawork can provide is not limited, however, to the use of close ups. In Lough’s broadcast of Mendes’s King Lear, for instance, his soaring use of the crane-mounted camera gave the Dover cliff scene a majesty that it did not possess in person. In-house audiences at the National watched Gloucester (Stephen Boxer) shuffle towards the edge of a barely elevated platform, bid farewell to the world, and leap one foot down to what he believed would be his death, producing a stage effect that the critic Michael

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Coveney described as ‘a bit trite’ (2014). The broadcast, in contrast, offered a markedly different experience, using a crane-mounted camera to depict Gloucester from a bird’s-eye view and then to float delicately, even sublimely, towards him as he took what he believed would be his final breath. In this cinematic sequence, viewers were invited to identify imaginatively with Gloucester’s tragic situation rather than to observe, in outward terms, its practical absurdities. By employing a grander and more directed visual aesthetic, Lough’s broadcast produced a sense of awe that was distinctly absent from the stage production. The instances above illustrate how the televisual and cinematic properties of filming have been used in broadcasts to recast moments of stage performance for greater clarity and emotional impact. It’s worth noting, however, that the hybrid aesthetics of filmed theatre can also lead to changes in the other direction—that is, that the possibilities of filming can influence how the stage production itself is performed, not just during the broadcast but also at other points in the run. Billie Thomas has shown how the process of preparing the RSC’s 2019 As You Like It for filming resulted in small tweaks in blocking, one of which was preserved after the broadcast. Explaining how rehearsals for the broadcast brought to light ‘poor sight lines’ in Act Three, scene two—when Orlando adorns trees in the Forest of Arden with Rosalind’s name—Thomas notes that Kimberly Sykes, the stage director, asked her Orlando (David Ajao) to kneel so that the trees behind him could be seen by the camera in the stalls (2019: 27– 8). Realizing that this adjustment would also improve the experience of in-person audience members sitting in these seats, Sykes kept the revised blocking for the remainder of the production’s run. ‘In this instance’, Thomas writes, ‘the experience of the cinema audience directly transferred to influencing the experience of those in the auditorium, creating a two-way relationship between these mediums’ (ibid.). Thomas’s research illustrates how the practical work of creating a live broadcast can lead to small changes mid-run. Elsewhere scholars and critics have questioned whether the anticipation of a broadcast might impact the stage production from its outset. In an analysis of the hybrid aesthetics of the National’s 2013 Othello, Purcell notes how the production’s ‘naturalistic box sets’, designed by Vicki Mortimer and ‘dressed with a filmic level of detail’, provided highly telegenic spaces into which the camera frequently cut, effectively omitting the theatrical frame (2017: 288–9). Though Purcell is careful to point out that other elements of the broadcast foregrounded the theatrical, producing a screen version

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that constantly ‘oscillat[ed] … between two registers’, he also recalls Laurie Osborne’s comments about how filmed theatre almost unavoidably features ‘staging and acting choices that betray an increasing awareness of “to-be-filmedness”’ (ibid.: 288, 291). Rather than ‘a simple binary’ between the originating stage production and the resulting film, Purcell implies a more reflexive relationship that might emerge as early as a show’s planning stages (ibid.: 291). A particular focus on set design, and its realization on film, surfaced even more explicitly in critical responses to Lyndsey Turner and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet , discussed in Chapter 1. In this case, the production’s mammoth set, designed by Es Devlin, produced a dramatic misé-en-scene that divided its critics. For Boika Sokolova and Nicoleta Cinpoe¸s, it was a feature clearly shaped by and for film: whereas on stage the set’s ‘cyclopean’ scale ‘belittled the actors’, ‘impeded human interaction’, and ‘had a diminishing effect on all’, in cinemas its ‘epic’, ‘widescreen vision’ found a more comfortable home (2017: 125–6, 128). The result, they argued, was a production that ‘per force cast [the theatre spectator] in a secondary role’ and ‘prioritized live-streaming [to cinema audiences] across the world’ (ibid: 124). Once again, the primacy of the stage production was called into question, with the prospect of the broadcast and the aesthetic possibilities of film potentially influencing this high-profile Hamlet from the outset. Such speculations recall Walter Benjamin and his prediction in the early twentieth century that, ‘To an ever greater degree[,] the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility’ (1999: 218)—or, to put it another way, that in an age of theatre broadcasting it becomes increasingly untenable that screen transmissions will have no impact on the conception and development of the stage production. In her review of the broadcast of Turner’s Hamlet , Lyn Gardner hinted at such issues while also taking care to contain them. While she celebrated how well the production worked on screen—due both to the aesthetics of its design and the way the broadcast could reach more of Cumberbatch’s enthusiastic fan base, which stretched far beyond London’s theatreland—she also noted that ‘It would be worrying if this production set a precedent for stage shows that are directed and designed with an eye to the live screening’ (2015). Gardner finished by commenting that she did not think ‘that really was the case here’, but the question of ‘design[ing] for reproducibility’ will always remain an issue when it comes to filmed theatre (ibid.). As much as they might overlap in

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their aims, techniques, and aesthetics, stage and screen drama inevitably deviate from one another in ways that challenge the seeming ideal of a broadcast as a transparent vessel for theatrical performance. Creative teams understandably confront such challenges differently, depending on their own interests, skills, and resources. While some stage directors choose to distance themselves from the broadcast, regarding it very much as a separate work, others embrace it enthusiastically as part of their wider artistic role. Others still respond to a growing culture of screened theatre by opting for something different and indeed more mediated than a live broadcast. Julie Taymor’s 2015 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, based on her 2013 production for Theatre for a New Audience, combined live and non-live filming in ways that drew on her extensive experience as both a stage and screen director. Like the broadcast teams at the Globe in the mid-2010s, Taymor and her crew filmed multiple live performances and mixed this footage together in post-production to create what they regarded as the best combined take (Taymor filmed four performances, in comparison to the Globe’s two). Alongside this material, she incorporated footage from additional onstage shoots, during which her team was able to use more film-friendly equipment such as hand-held cameras and Steadicams. In these studioeque moments, Taymor could instruct her actors to ‘be more intimate’ and to bring their ‘acting … down to an inner monologue’—in short, to be more filmic in their approach (Adams 2015). The result was a screen version that offered a ‘multi-layering of styles’, interleaving wider, theatrical views with close ups that were more tightly framed and mobile than what is typically possible with live filming (ibid.). Such hybridity is particularly evident in two kinds of scenes within the film: those that capture frenetic conversations (usually arguments) among groups of characters and those that foreground spectacular moments of staging. In Act One, scene one, for instance, the view begins with relatively open shots of Theseus (Roger Clark) and Hippolyta (Okwui Okpokwasili), the audience often in frame, before pushing into the argument that erupts between Egeus (Robert Langdon Lloyd) and the young lovers. While this view is similar to those offered in live broadcasts like van Someren’s Coriolanus , the extent of its closeness and agility sets it apart. Indeed, Barker has highlighted how ‘close ups’ in live broadcasts are still considerably wider than those used in films and ‘almost always include torso and arms’ (2013: 18). In Taymor’s Dream, the on-stage filming closes further in, at one point tightly framing Egeus’s enraged,

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even disgusted face as he accuses Lysander (Jake Horowitz) of stealing his daughter’s heart with ‘feigning voice’ and ‘bracelets of thy hair’ (1.1.31, 33). Even more noticeable is the movement of the hand-held camera, which slightly bounces as it follows characters’ dialogue and at one point quickly swivels to travel (rather than cut) between Theseus’s decree and Hermia’s reaction. As in the forum scene in Coriolanus , and indeed the opening scene of Lough’s Othello for NT Live, the remote viewer is located on stage with the characters, but with the additional sense of being able to turn their head and follow the action as it builds, as opposed to jumping to different viewpoints across the playing space. The patent stillness that the actors bring to these moments, created exclusively for the camera, further enhances their filmic quality: movement in the body is limited, while expression in the face is finely calibrated. This restrained intensity is especially visible in David Harewood’s Oberon, whom the camera encircles at one point as it takes in his pained reaction to Titania’s (Tina Benko’s) ‘These are the forgeries of jealousy’ speech (2.1.81). Starting at his right shoulder, the view slowly rotates with Oberon as he turns his body away from Titania, positioned upstage, and out to the downstage auditorium. As the camera moves, it remains fixed on Harewood’s impassive face, until Titania’s line about the increasingly interchangeable seasons causes his features to crumble in sorrow (Fig. 3.6). It is a moment that could never have registered for the in-person audience in the same way, not least because Harewood’s costume included a large, rebato-style collar that would have obscured the view of his face for many in the three-quarters-in-the-round, blackbox space. This is a sequence created by and for the camera: a silent, ‘inner monologue’, to return to Taymor’s words, situated within a theatrical setting. In many ways, Taymor’s approach, reliant as it is on additional filming and post-production mixing, is decidedly less theatrical than that employed in broadcasting programmes such as NT and RSC Live. It is certainly more mediated in terms of the amount of footage produced and the number of choices available when deciding how to present a certain moment of performance. And yet, there is a case to be made for a particular form of theatrical authenticity created by such a mode. For Taymor, who ‘much prefer[s] productions on film that have been edited this way’, ‘there’s a closeness to the actors that brings a liveness’ and ‘a wonderful level of intimacy’ that comes with increased mediation (Bosanquet 2015).

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Fig. 3.6 Oberon (David Harewood) reacts in close up to Titania’s (Tina Benko’s) speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2013), directed by Julie Taymor for Theatre for a New Audience (Screenshot)

For her, these ‘immersive’ films produce a feeling of theatrical aliveness that exists beyond time and space and that pulls the spectator into the multi-dimensional world of the performance (Adams 2015). In this sense, Taymor’s views reiterate those of the twentieth-century television director Alan Cooke, whose own work on translating stage performance for the screen suggested that more mediation was often the key: ‘Paradoxically, one need[s] to change a great deal to make it come out the same’ (Wyver 2014: 112). This is perhaps why more explicitly hybrid approaches have become increasingly common, both before the pandemic and as a result of it. Phyllida Lloyd, another director who has worked in both theatre and film, mixed live and additional filming in her all-female ‘Donmar Trilogy’ (2017–18), as did Thomas Kail in his highly anticipated film of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2020), which Kail also directed for the stage. Some broadcasting programmes have also adopted a more hybrid approach: since 2015, the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada has created films of its Shakespearean productions following a method similar to Globe on Screen’s, while also building in the ‘opportunity to reshoot anything that went wrong on the night and to film additional material’ (Kidnie 2018: 138–9). In a rather different vein, in 2016 the Comédie-Française in Paris embarked on a fully live programme with

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Pathé Live, but did so in a way that directed audiences’ attention to the screen medium. Aebischer has described how in the project’s inaugural broadcast, a production of Roméo et Juliette, the actor playing the Chorus (Bakary Sangaré) addressed the camera directly, saying, ‘“bonsoir dans l’espace de cinema” (“good evening in the cinema space”)’ (2018a: 209). The result, she argues, was a broadcast that departed decisively from transparency as an aesthetic ideal—so prominent in the development of Anglophone broadcasting programmes—and celebrated instead the medium-specific nature of this ‘production of a production’ (ibid.: 212). With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread closure of theatres, hybrid approaches to theatre-making proliferated even further. Chapter 5 explores some of the most experimental examples of such work, but there are also numerous instances of stage productions reimagined for the smaller, at-home screen. Erica Whyman’s The Winter’s Tale, which had been due to open at the RSC in March 2020, re-emerged in April 2021 on British television as a different kind of RSC Live broadcast. Filmed live, but with no audience and with opportunities for retakes and post-production editing, this screen adaptation followed many established conventions in broadcasting while also breaking new ground, most notably in having Leontes (Joseph Kloska) deliver his most frenzied asides directly to the camera. At the National, Simon Godwin took a more drastic approach, turning his initial plans for a stage production of Romeo and Juliet into a film shot in the back corridors and rehearsal spaces of the Bankside theatre. Beyond the Shakespearean axis of Stratford-upon-Avon and London, the company members at Forced Entertainment recreated their Table Top Shakespeare in a new, ‘at home’ version, recording themselves performing from kitchen tables and desks in their homes and uploading these single-take films to YouTube. Hybridity, then, has become inescapable. The idea of live, synchronous experience may have shaped the origins of twenty-first-century theatre broadcasting, but its present and future are increasingly oriented towards as-live, live-adjacent, and a-live experience. Of course, a huge factor in the proliferation of such hybrid work has been the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of which will hopefully dissipate as time wears on. But even before 2020, theatre broadcasters were moving in the direction of filming methods and dissemination strategies that understood liveness in more flexible, context-specific ways. If audiences in other time zones would never be able to see a cinema broadcast in real time, then why not polish

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it in post-production before sending it out to global viewers? If keeping cameras off-stage meant missing out on opportunities to render moments of performance more viscerally alive, then why not shoot and intermix additional footage that makes the most of the affordances of the screen? An obvious answer is that such techniques dilute the authority and authenticity of the stage production on display, producing something that is no longer the ‘real’ performance, but rather an adulterated version of it. Such a view, however, overlooks two important factors: first, that a production is never a single, definitive instance, but rather a collection of versions that vary in their degrees of similarity; and second, that our existence of life off-stage—that is, ‘real life’—is itself a hybrid thing. Digital and offline experience interpenetrate one another, just as temporally live and asynchronous moments do. Trying to cordon one off from the other risks producing something that in its own way is strangely brittle and artificial. This isn’t to say that the future of theatre on screen is essentially to turn it into a movie. There is already a long history of stage productions, especially of Shakespeare’s plays, forming the basis of film versions specifically intended to be films, from Peter Brook’s King Lear to Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V to Julie Taymor’s Titus. This is a rich genre of creativity in its own right, but it typically does not aspire to retain the theatrical context or co-present performativity found in its originating production. It is theatre turned into film, as opposed to filmed theatre. The latter, in contrast, is a fundamentally hybrid art form that strives to preserve feelings of liveness, co-presence, and spatial continuity associated with the theatre, but that uses the capabilities of film to do so. It is a mode of theatre-making that at once extends audience access—sometimes extraordinarily—while simultaneously performing its own skilful, complex, and evolving forms of artistry. Where such developments will lead in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic is at once a pressing and uncertain question. As I have indicated, high-end theatre broadcasts to cinemas are expensive to create and, compared with online streaming, limited in their reach. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that the number of large-scale broadcasts will contract as producers look for ways to reduce costs and maximize revenue. A broadcast of Cumberbatch’s Hamlet or Hiddleston’s Coriolanus can easily recoup expenditures, but those without star performers or other kinds of popular appeal risk running at a loss. At the same time, the pandemic demonstrated that there is considerable interest in screened

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theatre around the world, and furthermore that there are ways of creating and distributing digital recordings of live performance less expensively. These ways almost invariably involve broadcasting to homes as opposed to public venues—a radical shift in context that produces a major change in a performance’s outer frame, to return to Bennett. Such changes also create new possibilities in terms of audience members’ access to different kinds of inner frame. In May 2021, the Artistic Director of the Young Vic in London, Kwame Kwei-Armah, announced that the theatre would livestream all its future productions, provided that cast and crew were willing (Brown 2021). Called ‘Best Seat in Your House’, the initiative involved broadcasting to homes rather than cinemas, where many of the Young Vic’s star-studded productions in the 2010s were shown as part of NT Live programming. Even more radically, it proposed to offer spectators control over which camera view they could see during the broadcast, placing them in what the programme called the ‘Director’s Chair’, as well as the ability to switch over at times to a ready-mixed ‘Director’s Cut’. Such agency, Kwei-Armah suggested, would produce an experience of live performance that was more akin to that in the theatre. ‘Even though the director pushes me in the direction of where he or she wants me to look’, he explained, ‘I have the final say … That’s really where the idea was born – of giving the audience the choice to change seats’ (ibid.). Such a proposition reiterated the idea of theatre as a place where audiences exercise their ‘rights of reception’, to refer back to Cochrane and Bonner, looking where they choose and creating meaning through such agency (2014: 127). But it also contributed to the long-standing lack of visibility concerning the art of theatre broadcasting and the skill involved in it. It’s possible that, in reclaiming the ability to look where they like, spectators might find themselves newly appreciating, and missing, the talents of the screen director that have so often gone unseen. After a bit of time enjoying the novelty and interactivity of being in the director’s chair, they may find themselves longing afresh for the director’s cut, and the powerful combination of theatrical, televisual, and filmic experience that it can provide. For while all recordings of performance extend theatre’s potential reach, only the most skilfully crafted also augment its artistry.

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Notes 1. Part of this chapter first appeared as ‘“The Forms of Things Unknown”: Shakespeare and the Rise of the Live Broadcast’ (2017), Shakespeare Bulletin 35:4, 627–62, available online: doi:10.1353/shb.2017.0047. I am grateful to Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to republish this material. 2. In the archived camera scripts for NT Live Shakespeare broadcasts through 2015, the number of camera cues range from 645 (All’s Well That Ends Well in 2009) to 877 (Hamlet in 2010) (All’s Well That Ends Well Camera Script 2009; Hamlet Camera Script 2009; The Comedy of Errors Camera Script 2012; Timon of Athens Camera Script 2012; Othello Camera Script 2013; King Lear Camera Script 2014; Hamlet Camera Script 2015). Wyver has indicated through personal communication that this is broadly comparable to the number of shots in RSC broadcasts.

Productions Consulted Branagh, Kenneth (2013) Macbeth broadcast, starring Kenneth Branagh, directed for screen by Tim van Someren for NT Live, Manchester International Festival and Stratford-upon-Avon Picturehouse, 20 July. Branagh, Kenneth (2016) Romeo and Juliet broadcast, starring Lily James and Richard Madden, directed for screen by Ben Caron for Kenneth Branagh Theatre Live, Garrick Theatre, London, and Stratford-upon-Avon Picturehouse, 7 July. Doran, Gregory (2013) Richard II broadcast, starring David Tennant, directed for screen by Robin Lough for RSC Live, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Curzon Bloomsbury, London, 13 November [subsequently accessed through DramaOnline and on DVD]. Etchells, Tim (2015) Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare broadcast, Forced Entertainment, livestream from Berliner Festspiele, 25 June–4 July [subsequently accessed through the company’s private online archive]. Etchells, Tim (2016) Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare, Forced Entertainment, Barbican Centre, The Pit, London, 5 March. Etchells, Tim (2020) Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare: At Home, Forced Entertainment, September-November, YouTube, https://www.youtube. com/playlist?list=PL-blz3DjyJIyhGeDEPROuy6WqwDd6mTKO [accessed 1 December 2020]. Gielgud, John (1995) Hamlet recording, starring Richard Burton, produced for screen by William Sargent and Alfred W. Crown, Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, New York, Paul Brownstein Productions and Image Entertainment, DVD.

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Godwin, Simon (2021) Romeo and Juliet, starring Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor, filmed at the National Theatre, London, and first aired on television on Sky Arts, 4 April. Hytner, Nicholas (2010) Hamlet broadcast, starring Rory Kinnear, directed for screen by Robin Lough for NT Live, Olivier Theatre, London, 9 December, National Theatre Archive, London, RNT/D/1/1/8 [subsequently accessed through DramaOnline and NT at Home]. Hytner, Nicholas (2013) Othello broadcast, starring Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear, directed for screen by Robin Lough for NT Live, Olivier Theatre, London, and Stratford-upon-Avon Picturehouse, 26 September [subsequently accessed through National Theatre Archive, London, RNT/D/1/1/8, DramaOnline, and NT at Home]. Khan, Iqbal (2015) Othello, starring Hugh Quarshie, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, June. Khan, Iqbal (2015) Othello broadcast, starring Hugh Quarshie, directed for screen by Robin Lough for RSC Live, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratfordupon-Avon, and Stratford-upon-Avon Picturehouse, 26 August [subsequently accessed through DramaOnline and on DVD]. Mendes, Sam (2014) King Lear, starring Simon Russell Beale, Olivier Theatre, London, June. Mendes, Sam (2014) King Lear broadcast, starring Simon Russell Beale, directed for screen by Robin Lough for NT Live, Olivier Theatre, London, and Stratford-upon-Avon Picturehouse, 1 May [subsequently accessed through National Theatre Archive, London, RNT/D/1/1/30]. Munby, Jonathan (2015) The Merchant of Venice recording, starring Jonathan Pryce, directed for screen by Robin Lough for Globe on Screen, Globe Theatre, London, accessed through DramaOnline and on DVD. Rourke, Josie (2014) Coriolanus broadcast, starring Tom Hiddleston, directed for screen by Tim van Someren for NT Live, Donmar Warehouse, London, and Stratford-upon-Avon Picturehouse, 30 January [subsequently accessed through National Theatre Archive, London, RNT/D/1/1/26, DramaOnline, and NT at Home]. Taymor, Julie (2015) A Midsummer Night’s Dream recording, directed for screen by Taymor for cinema distribution, Theatre for a New Audience, New York, and Stratford-upon-Avon Picturehouse, 28 June [subsequently accessed on DVD]. Turner, Lyndsey (2015) Hamlet broadcast, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, directed for screen by Robin Lough for NT Live, Barbican Centre, London, and Stratford-upon-Avon Picturehouse, 15 October [subsequently accessed through National Theatre Archive, London, RNT/D/1/1/43].

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Whyman, Erica (2021) The Winter’s Tale recording, directed for screen by Bridget Caldwell, recorded at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-uponAvon, first aired on television on BBC Four, 25 April.

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CHAPTER 4

Mediated Performance

A truly comprehensive account of the staging of new technologies through Shakespearean performance would start not with the rise of the smartphone, but with the sixteenth and seventeenth-century stages where Shakespeare’s plays were first presented. From the use of trapdoors and descending scenery to the introduction of candlelight and ‘quaint device[s]’, like the disappearing banquet in The Tempest , the early modern theatre was no stranger to technological innovation (3.3.52). In the centuries of performance that have followed, technical ingenuity has remained theatre’s close friend. The popularity of moveable scenery and flying machines on the Restoration stage; the thrill of optical illusions in the Victorian era, such as magic lanterns and Pepper’s ghost; the widespread embrace of audio-visual recording in the twentieth century: all have shaped the presentation and experience of Shakespearean drama as multi-sensory theatre. Given this book’s focus on digital technology, however, and the widespread expansion of screen culture that has come with it, this chapter focuses on more recent, computer-enabled explorations of technology in Shakespearean performance. Often described as ‘intermedial’ theatremaking, such work does not just use digital technology to help create its scenic design and soundscape—a mode that Chiel Kattenbelt has characterized as ‘multimedial’—but also engages in an artistic and analytical

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conversation between different forms of media and their particular affordances and limitations (2008: 22–3). For Kattenbelt, intermedial artistry is defined by its emphasis on the ‘co-relations between different media’ and its constant interleaving of these forms, which in turn prompts a ‘redefinion’ and ‘refreshed perception’ among audiences about how these media work (ibid.: 25). While any production of a Shakespeare play that uses computer-enabled music, lighting, projections, or video displays might be described as digitally multimedial, only those that draw attention to the fundamental nature of these media and their interaction with the live, embodied performance of the actors achieve intermedial status. With such distinctions in mind, this chapter looks at a range of intermedial stagings of Shakespeare from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on how directors have used digital media both to illuminate Shakespeare’s plays and prompt audiences to reflect on their own experiences as digital subjects. As with the previous chapter on broadcasting, it starts by looking back at earlier experiments in technology-rich Shakespeare, highlighting the particular role that Hamlet has played in facilitating avant-garde artists’ exploration of new technologies. It then goes on to consider how this more experimental approach to theatremaking eventually took hold in the mainstream, particularly through productions of Shakespeare’s Roman plays that focused on intersections between digital media and contemporary politics. For many directors, the camera’s ability to magnify and reframe the experiences of its subjects has proven at once alluring and problematic: characters are exposed to the visual scrutiny of the audience in ways that both endow them with life and strip it away. In this chapter, I explore how such a phenomenon not only creates new meaning within Shakespearean drama, but also resensitizes audiences to the disconcerting role everyday technologies can play in life beyond the theatre. In the final section of the chapter, I argue that such intermedial techniques are at their most powerful when they create forms of spectacle that are at once captivating and alienating, alluring and troubling—that use technologies to disrupt audience expectations about theatrical experience in ways that simultaneously dazzle and estrange. In such moments, audiences are made aware of the potential of such technologies and their limitations and even failures. Such ambivalence pertains to both the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of theatrical performance, which can operate distinctively from one another but never entirely independently. Watching intermedial theatre, I suggest, is both a way of watching stage

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performance and a way of watching ourselves. It is as much about the esoterics of form as it is about the ethics of performance, with the most skilful instances of such theatre-making drawing renewed attention to the complicated beauty of both.

4.1

Avant-Garde Origins

Just as there is a long history of technology of all kinds on the stage, intermedial theatre, which is typically associated with the rise of electronic technology, significantly predates mobile computing and social media in the twenty-first century. In his comprehensive account of the origins of digital performance, Steve Dixon highlights the fact that ‘Theater, dance, and performance art have always been interdisciplinary, or “multimedia,” forms’, and furthermore that ‘performance practices’ dealing with questions of human–machine relations and mediated experience can ‘be traced back through decades, even centuries of performance history’ (2007: 39–40). Dixon identifies the 1960s as the time when mixed-media performance really ‘began to proliferate’, and the 1990s as the point at which ‘dialogic media productions’—that is, more intermedial ones, in which film and video took on ‘real agency’ within the performance—emerged with clarity and force (ibid.: 89, 104). This section explores this earlier history of intermedial theatre by looking at three experimental presentations of Shakespeare that helped paved the way for more mainstream uses of digital technology on stage in the twenty-first century. Dixon’s history illuminates the avant-garde and abstract tendencies of performance artists interested in media experimentation, from the Futurists and Bauhausians in the early part of the twentieth century to the punk and cyborg practitioners towards its end. One thing that is also noticeable in his account is the emphasis on new work as opposed to anything canonical. Indeed, at one point Dixon quotes the leading intermedial theatre-maker Robert Wilson, who in 1976 identified Shakespearean drama as precisely the kind of material that he didn’t want to produce. Frustrated by a lack of interest in his work in England, Wilson commented, ‘It’s a backward country with no understanding of contemporary art. They tell me to do Shakespeare. I do what I do, someone else can do Shakespeare’ (ibid.: 99). Like the Futurists long before them, who in 1909 decried a ‘futile worship of the past’ that left new artists feeling ‘exhausted, shrunken, beaten down’, many of the most noted and adventurous digital artists in the final decades of the twentieth century chose to

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jettison existing cultural ‘Mytholog[ies]’, including those associated with Shakespeare, in an attempt to forge new ones (Marinetti 1998: 250, 252). And yet, for some intermedial theatre-makers—including, eventually, Wilson himself—reworking old texts with new tools proved revelatory in its own way. Perhaps this is because, as Emily Linnemann has suggested, the cultural impact of artistic innovation is often more palpable when practitioners take existing materials and do something unexpected with them, rather than creating something entirely new from scratch (2011: 13). Some might argue, with good reason, that this is due to risk-averse audiences avoiding completely new material, but it also seems to be the case that the skilful combination of the known and the unknown, the established and the experimental, can create particularly fertile ground for questioning established value systems. A powerful way of dismantling entrenched modes of thinking, after all, is to take something familiar apart. By combining classical texts such as Shakespeare’s with digital tools, a number of intermedial artists in the late twentieth century invited their audiences to see familiar stories differently, and in doing so to think more deeply about the histories and values invested in them. Both the intrinsic power of juxtaposing the old and the new, and the external attention generated by it, go some way towards explaining why the intermedial work of The Wooster Group, a theatre collective based in Manhattan, has become so central in the history of digital performance. Initially founded in the late 1960s by Richard Schechner as The Performance Group, the company took its later name and shape in 1980 under the leadership of Elizabeth LeCompte. As ‘One of the first experimental theatre companies to bring video monitors on stage and enter into dialogue with them in the course of a production’, The Wooster Group combined avant-garde performance methods with mass media technologies to explore questions about human volition, cultural value, and aesthetic impact in a society increasingly dominated by screens (Cartelli 2008: 149). While the company has, at times, developed entirely new work, it is especially famous for its adaptations of canonical texts and the forms of deconstruction explored through them. Classic American playwrights including Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and Eugene O’Neill, as well as European giants such as Jean Racine and Anton Chekhov, all inspired intermedial work from the company in its early decades, though Shakespeare did not figure centrally in its productions until the twenty-first century. One partial exception was the 1969 Makbeth that Schechner

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created with The Performance Group, which included artists who would remain with the collective through its later reconfiguration. Although this adaptation did not involve electronic media, it pursued deconstructionist, mixed-media methods that would eventually become hallmarks of the later company’s influential output (Innes 1993: 195; Gussow 1970). Featuring ‘Life-size photographs from previous (traditional) Macbeths, placards bearing well-known lines from the play, and mirrors [that] formed the irregular walls of a twisting passage’, Schechner’s production broke Shakespeare’s tragedy into verbal and visual icons and sought to estrange its audiences from accustomed patterns of interpretation (Innes 1993: 195). While theatre critics, and ultimately Schechner himself, voiced doubts about the production’s intellectual and aesthetic force, the ideas generated through this ‘exploded jigsaw puzzle’ of a project helped foster long-standing interests among Wooster Group members in the relations between word, image, bodies, and media, and the constellated meanings they create (Gussow 1970). It was a different group of avant-garde performers in Lower Manhattan, however, who produced the first widely noted version of Shakespeare that might be described as intermedial in the more modern, plugged-in sense. In 1986, the aforementioned Robert Wilson accepted an invitation to work with student actors at New York University, where they staged a new version of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine that would tour Europe—and at last London—the following year. Completed in 1977, Müller’s five-part play is a ‘stripped, blasted, divided’—and, at about seven pages in total, highly condensed—response to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Rogoff 1987: 54). Employing a surrealist style, in which character and narrative figure far less significantly than ideological exploration and critique, the play exemplifies what Hans-Thies Lehmann famously dubbed ‘postdramatic theatre’—that is, ‘a theatre that feels bound to operate beyond drama, at a time “after” the authority of the dramatic paradigm’ (2006: 27). Although the text of Hamletmachine does reference electronic media—specifically, ‘three TV-sets ’ playing silently on stage—the play does not necessarily require an intermedial approach to staging (Müller 2000: 213). As several critics have pointed out, Müller’s elaborate and often extraordinary stage directions are far from practical commands, with lines like ‘Enormous room. Ophelia. Her heart is a clock’ or ‘He steps into the armor, splits with the ax the heads of Marx, Lenin, Mao. Snow. Ice Age’ giving some sense of the poetic hybridity and absurdist imagination at

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work in the script (ibid.: 212, 214; Zurbrugg 1988: 442–3; Gussow 1986). Wilson’s staging, however, moved Hamletmachine explicitly into the intermedial realm, both through its prominent use of a projected film of the actors during the play’s ‘Scherzo’ section, and through the mechanically precise choreography that the ensemble enacted on a loop, like living automatons, from the start of the two-hour production until its end (Fig. 4.1). Each of the play’s five parts was told through the same series of ‘ritual actions’ and stark ‘clap[s] on a woodblock’, save one crucial distinction: at the end of each part, the stage was reset at a ninety-degree turn, before the sequence recommenced from the top (Rogoff 1986: 55). Like the clock in Ophelia’s heart, Wilson’s production followed a metronomic, mechanical beat, with its fourteen actors displaying a ‘trance-like commitment’ to ‘technical precision’ as they carried out their parts on repeat (Ratcliffe 1987). And yet, as with all forms of repetition, each iteration produced a growing sense of difference, both through the

Fig. 4.1 Hamletmachine (1986), directed by Robert Wilson for New York University (Photograph by Friedemann Simon and reproduced courtesy of The Watermill Center)

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changing content of Müller’s script and through an increasingly detailed awareness of the actors’ movements, which for some spectators began to evoke forms and sensations reminiscent of mass media. Reflecting on the ‘sophisticated video-editing [that] allows rock stars like Prince and Madonna to effect split-second, beat-to-beat transitions from costume to costume, or from pose to pout’, Nicholas Zurbrugg likened the frenetic style and pace of Wilson’s choreography to the jump-cutting and visual fragmentation characteristic of music videos, still a relatively new genre at this time (1988: 442). The added presence of the screened Scherzo movement, in which the actors’ faces morphed first into ‘apes and then, as on a computer screen, into a Cubist canvas’, only deepened the analogy, fully incorporating the performers into the world of the video image and the modern phantasmagoria it could create (Gussow 1986). If Wilson’s production focused primarily on what happens to human subjects when they are viewed through the lens of electronic media, then another experimental Hamlet —devised a decade later by the renowned French-Canadian theatre-artist, Robert Lepage—explored the extent to which the ‘real’ and the ‘mechanical’ were fundamental extensions of one another. By all accounts, this one-man show, entitled Elsinore (or Elsineur, in its original, French-language form), was actually a twohander: the actor playing Hamlet and all the other parts (initially Lepage himself), and the ‘immense and complex multimedia stage machine’ composed of numerous panels that rotated, collapsed, and transformed with the help of computer and hydraulic technologies (Knowles 2002: 88). This new kind of Hamlet machine, upon which Lepage and his collaborators projected elaborate image sequences and live video streams, garnered considerable notoriety in 1996 when the English-language version of the show arrived in the UK and the technical apparatus failed to work. After a breakdown in rehearsals, the entire run at the Edinburgh Festival had to be cancelled, prompting the critic Charles Spencer to complain about live performance’s increasing overreliance on technology. ‘The theatre consists of living actors delivering the words … of human writers’, he opined, rather than ‘computerised sets and electronic wonders’ (Spencer 1996). For Lepage, however, the living actor and ingenious machine were not so clearly separable, at least as far as Elsinore was concerned. ‘Robert says technology is a kind of limb’, his producer Michael Morris commented at the time, and Lepage himself went on to describe the set as ‘One of the

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[production’s] two main dancers’ (Glaister 1996). This interweaving of the human and technological was at once modern and classical, evoking contemporary transhumanist thinking, which held that the line between the biological and technological was becoming increasingly indistinct, and fifteenth-century Renaissance humanism, which sought to extend human capability by harnessing the power of machines. It was no coincidence, then, that amid an array of live video streams and other twentieth-century media, the production’s staging of Hamlet’s ‘what a piece of work is a man’ speech featured a large projection of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man (2.2.305)—an image that also appeared in the programme and publicity materials (Giesekam 2007: 231). Man and machine, past and present merged together in this production, which presented humanity and its art as mutually intricate, dexterous, and spectacular forms of creation. In a feature article previewing Elsinore’s UK tour, which did successfully take place after the difficulties in Edinburgh, Andy Lavender described the mid-nineties as ‘a teething period for multimedia work’, before ending with a prediction from Lepage: the more I work in different places around the world, the more I really see how live performance and recorded performance are moving towards one point. It’s all going to be meeting in the next few years and it’s coming very quickly. (1996)

The next decade would indeed see a rise in intermedial theatre-making, and with it a growing interest in the vanishing point between theatre and film. And while many Shakespearean productions would continue to explore the relationship between these two modes of performance, none would do so as fully or as famously as the aforementioned Wooster Group, which in 2006 finally approached Shakespeare head-on through its own version of Hamlet . In moving with The Wooster Group into the twentyfirst century, I also, paradoxically, go back into the past—specifically, to 1964, the year of Richard Burton’s ‘Electronovision’ Hamlet , discussed in Chapter 3. For it was not the text of Shakespeare’s tragedy that most captivated the imaginations the company, but rather the enormous history of stage and screen performance that it had inspired. The momentum for The Wooster Group’s Hamlet originated with company member Scott Shepherd, who had ‘always had an obsession with that play’ and a fascination with how every Hamlet is, to an extent,

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‘the collection of all Hamlets’ (Zinoman 2007). After organizing informal readings and screenings of several film versions of the play, including Gielgud and Burton’s, Shepherd convinced LeCompte that it might form the basis of an interesting project. ‘I really resisted it’, LeCompte later said of Shakespeare’s Hamlet , before explaining how it was the Electronovision footage of Burton’s performance that eventually captivated her imagination. Having seen the production in person in her early twenties, she described how the recording conjured up memories of a cultural moment that it simultaneously failed to reproduce. ‘It was romantic, for me … to see this film that had nothing to do with what I remembered of the production’, and this experience prompted her to try to reassemble the performance like a ‘puzzle’ (LeCompte et al. 2013: 122–4). The resulting production was at once a self-consciously fastidious exercise in historical reconstruction and a more purposeful investigation of the relationship between recorded and live performance. As members of the company re-enacted scenes from the Burton film, which played behind them on a large screen, they were simultaneously subordinated to and archly in control of the mediated event. For while their professed ‘first duty’ might have been to ‘present only the shells of the performances they [were] imitating’, seemingly a very passive task, their extensive editing and reinterpretation of the film—both in terms of the actual, remixed footage that they projected and the often parodic live action that accompanied it—suggested something far more dominant and even domineering (Brantley 2007). ‘[T]he actors’ physical virtuosity and technical skill … forc[es] the film “original” … into the background’, W. B. Worthen has argued; ‘for much of the performance, the live actors displace or even erase their avatars’ (2008: 134–16). Through this troubling of the authority of recorded media, The Wooster Group presented video as both the principal medium through which we document and seemingly save the past, and a mutable, impressionistic, and infinitely reworkable narrative that is no more stable than the memories of those who were there. That this production was a response to Hamlet , as were those of Wilson, Lepage, and many others before it, was of course no coincidence. As I suggested in Chapter 1, the intellectual and cultural weight of this play has made it a repeated point of focus in digital theatre-making, particularly for practitioners interested in deconstructed modes of performance. The play itself continually commands its titular character to take action and to remember—his father, his duty, his humanity, and his mortality—while culturally it

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has accrued an immense history of performance and memorialization. Together these factors made it an ideal memory machine through which to run Woosterian experiments into the authority of performance, both live and recorded. ‘[A] system that works on its own allows me to meditate on it’, LeCompte noted in relation to the ‘piece of videotape’ her Hamlet was ‘following’, but her comment could have applied just as readily to the iconic Shakespearean work churning away at its core (LeCompte et al. 2013: 131). Formal experimentation for its own sake, without any obligation to further a narrative or build a character, is a centrepiece of The Wooster Group approach, and the same could be said for Wilson and (to a lesser extent) Lepage. In the work of all these practitioners, the postdramatic values of ‘self-reflexivity’ and ‘decomposition’ have played an influential role in the creative process, as has an emphasis on technical craft (Lehmann 2006: 51). Such craft involves breaking existing artistic icons down into smaller, de-contextualized pieces, and then reassembling them into something newly estranging. Shakespeare has proven rich material for such decomposition, while televisual and eventually digital technologies have presented themselves as useful tools for pulling this icon and his intertexts apart. In the case of The Wooster Group, the language of manual labouring has featured prominently—and some might say provocatively—in its self-presentation and creative legacy. The company’s New York home is known as the Performing Garage, and past members have gone on to found other performance collectives including the Builders Association and the Elevator Repair Group. Through such language, these companies have associated their aesthetic craft with its more mechanical cousins, casting the work they do and the technologies they use in a pragmatic and even utilitarian light. But despite such self-presentation, there’s no denying that all the productions discussed in this section were highly conceptual endeavours, aimed at dismantling engines of culture rather than those of the motorized kind. It’s also worth emphasizing that they were by no means the only media-intensive, formally experimental responses to Shakespeare in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: as Aneta Mancewicz has shown, continental European theatre in particular developed a long, rich, and varied tradition of intermedial theatre-making around Shakespeare’s plays (2014). The international profiles and privileged positions of the North American practitioners discussed here, the philosophical quality of their engagement with media change, their choice of Hamlet as a source

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text, and the fact that they presented their work in English contributed to their visibility during these decades, but they were not working in isolation. In many ways, what each of these three productions had to say about Shakespeare, performance, and media technologies was markedly distinct. While Wilson’s production explored what man looked like through the lens of technological mediation, and Lepage’s celebrated what he could be with it, The Wooster Group’s suggested that such technologies were as malleable and ripe for manipulation as humans themselves—more an analogue to human experience than an aggressor or apotheosis. What this trio did share, however, was an ambitious, avant-garde spirit and a guiding interest in theatre as an abstract process focused on formal experimentation. Though each engaged deeply with contemporary questions about the impact of media technology on modern life, all three eschewed anything akin to narrative storytelling and the explicit social lesson that might come with it. Steeped though they were in the language of mass media and the idea of mechanical craft, these productions helped situate intermedial Shakespeare in its early decades as something firmly outside the mainstream.

4.2

The Politics of Mediation

The biggest difference between the mixed-media endeavours that characterized the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and those that have emerged since, is the extent to which these later manifestations have moved closer to what one might think of as more conventional theatre culture. Indeed, in her book-length study of Shakespeare and ‘performance technologies’, Pascale Aebischer looks specifically at ‘representative mainstream productions’ in the UK in the twenty-first century, and in doing so illustrates the breadth of intermedial work that could be found beyond the avant-garde fringes by this time (2020: 28). With the growing digitization of everyday life, questions about how people perceive and construct reality, how they consume and make sense of global news, and whether these forms of communication empower or inhibit them as citizens have become all the more pressing. Many theatrical explorations of Shakespeare have, accordingly, built such questions into their dramatic visions. In some cases, this has occurred through the relatively simple inclusion of digital objects among the settings and properties, as in Theatre for a New Audience’s 2007 The

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Merchant of Venice, directed by Darko Tresnjak and starring F. Murray Abraham, which presented the three caskets as a trio of shiny laptops. Elsewhere such engagement has involved a more sustained interweaving of communications media into performance methods, as in the Almeida Theatre’s 2017 Hamlet , directed by Robert Icke and starring Andrew Scott, which used screens located throughout the auditorium and on stage to relay parts of the plot in the vein of twenty-four-hour news broadcasts and real-time video feeds. While such productions are as diverse as they are numerous, collectively they have signalled a growing preoccupation with digital culture and the questions it raises in more narratively driven, naturalistic approaches to staging Shakespeare. This is not to say, of course, that all intermedial productions in the twentieth and very early twenty-first centuries were deconstructed and experimental, and all those after mimetic and textually oriented. The National Theatre’s 2003 Henry V , for instance, directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Adrian Lester, was at once intensely interested in dramatizing the role of ‘contemporary media spin’ in the waging of war and firmly committed to clear, lifelike storytelling (Rokison-Woodall 2017: 109). Annie Dorsen’s 2013 A Piece of Work, in turn, was highly conceptual in both its performance methods and its take on what a text like Hamlet means, as I demonstrated in Chapter 1. But, broadly speaking, the most visible and critically noted intermedial productions of Shakespeare have tended to adhere to Lavender’s argument that cuttingedge theatre in the twentieth century favoured ‘the “classic” postmodern tropes of detachment, irony and contingency’, while radical performance in the twenty-first century has emphasized meaning-making, affective commitment, and political engagement (2016: 1). ‘Culturally, the real could not be avoided, even where it was contested’, Lavender writes; ‘And we’, as audiences, ‘developed a new taste for it’ (ibid.: 19). With such ideas in mind, this section turns to two large-scale, highly mediated productions of Shakespeare that straddled the divide between avant-garde and mainstream, non-representational and didactic. While in many ways these projects were also highly experimental and niche in their cultural appeal, their engagement with a more traditional sense of narrative and their explicit interest in the politics of technology aligned them more closely with Lavender’s ‘the real’. The first is Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s 2007 Roman Tragedies (Romeinse Tragedies ), directed by Ivo van Hove, which toured the world for more than a decade and

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became ‘one of the most recognisable intermedial performances of Shakespeare in recent years’ (Mancewicz 2014: 135). The second, National Theatre Wales’s 2012 Coriolan/us , directed by Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes, played for just eleven days in a disused aircraft hangar in Wales and accordingly has left a fainter record in contemporary performance histories. Despite these differences in profile, however, the productions form a complementary pair: in their mutual exploration of mediated experience, the new forms of spectatorship it has created, and its impact on our twenty-first-century public sphere, they offered commentaries on the agency of the citizen/spectator in an era of media abundance. Furthermore, in using Shakespeare’s Roman plays as a basis for their investigations, they made a case for the continuing political relevance of these four-hundred-year-old texts, while also drawing audiences’ attention to the strangeness of digital technologies that have, in a very short space of time, become culturally normalized and even banal. ‘[T]he most significant piece of theatre in Britain over the past decade’, ‘The best Shakespeare I have ever seen’: when Toneelgroep Amsterdam brought Roman Tragedies to the Barbican in London for three days in March 2017, theatre critics took note (Trueman 2017; Marcus and Ralf 2017). In this epic project, which presented Shakespeare’s Coriolanus , Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra as a single, six-hour drama in Dutch, digital media featured prominently in the stage design and dramaturgical vision. On-stage cameras projected close ups of the actors onto a large screen suspended from the ceiling; television monitors located throughout the playing space displayed live feeds of the onstage action as well as recorded material from global politics and popular culture; a red tickertape anticipated climactic events to come (‘5 minutes until the death of Julius Caesar’); and, at one point, live video taken on a street outside the theatre relayed the death of Enobarbus to audiences in the house. Through such technologies—at once highly familiar in modern life, and yet strangely foreign on the Shakespearean stage— audiences were invited to negotiate different versions of ‘the real’ and to consider how they might come together to tell a story that was both about Shakespeare’s Roman characters and the times in which we ourselves live. While Roman Tragedies has resonated strongly with audiences entangled in the world of smartphones and mobile computing, its origins stretch back to the early years of the 2000s, before such technologies took off. As Laurens De Vos has shown, both the 1999 debut of Big Brother,

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which started in the Netherlands before exploding into a global franchise, and the shocking murder in 2002 of the right-wing Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn directly informed the cultural and political climate in which this production took shape (2018: 68–9). Despite the obvious differences between these two events, both highlighted the extent to which television media could now relay human politics, large and small, in an immediate and very intimate way, as well as the huge public appetite for such a display. Because Fortuyn was shot in the parking lot of a media centre directly after giving an interview, ‘the whole country could follow live streaming of the politician’s body drenched in blood, surrounded by an ambulance staff trying to resuscitate him’ (ibid.: 68). The most private and tragic moments of a person’s life might be broadcast for mass consumption, whether under the guise of global politics, popular entertainment, or, most disconcertingly, both at the same time. Van Hove’s production explored such issues through the constant mediation of its subject matter and an invitation to audiences to shape— or, in twenty-first-century parlance, to ‘curate’—their own experience as spectators. After the first fifteen minutes of the production, a voice came on the loud speaker and invited audience members to come onto the stage and lounge on one of the many couches scattered across the conference centre-style set (Fig. 4.2). Further short breaks allowed spectators to move again, including to different seats in the auditorium, and in doing so to watch the production from what Rob Conkie has described as ‘individuated’, ‘partial’, and ‘multi-directional’ vantage points (2016: 95). Because scenes took place all over the stage, with both the blocking and the set frequently obscuring the view, the clearest and most impactful way of watching the performance was often through one of the television monitors or the large screen at the front. Audiences were constantly presented with a choice between an obstructed but ‘real’ view of the actors from wherever in the auditorium they were sitting and the more direct but technologically mediated one offered on the screens. Theatrical presence was disrupted and redoubled by the prismatic effects of digital technology, which fragmented audience experience even as it extended it. Coriolanus’s backroom conversations with his advisors, for instance, were performed so far upstage that they were virtually invisible to audience members still seated in the house, whereas the on-stage cameras trained on them provided intimate access to the dealings taking place. About an hour later, the final confrontation between Coriolanus (Gijs Scholten van Aschat) and Volumnia (Frieda Pittoors) occurred further

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Fig. 4.2 On-stage audiences watch Caesar on stage (bottom centre) and on screen in Roman Tragedies (2007–), directed by Ivo van Hove for Toneelgroep Amsterdam (Photograph by Jan Versweyveld and reproduced courtesy of Internationaal Theater Amsterdam)

downstage, but with the war hero’s back turned to the main audience. This meant that the only way most spectators could see his increasingly pained expression was through the close up relayed by the camera, which provided a view not unlike that of the 2014 broadcast of Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse, discussed in Chapter 3. With so much dramatic action happening across a very busy stage, the camera provided both a voyeuristic sense of access and a means of closing down the noise and locating the drama—or at least one version of it. Like the continuous news cycles that fill twenty-four-hour broadcasts in the world beyond the theatre, these real-time transmissions captured the details of life as it occurred while simultaneously moulding them into something more heightened, personally exposing, and readily consumable for eager witnesses. While the phenomenon of selective and sensational media coverage predates the advent of smartphones, the significance of Roman Tragedies

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only intensified as this later digital landscape took shape. Though mobile phones were never incorporated into the characters’ world, by the time the production toured to New York in 2012 audience members were encouraged to use their own devices to photograph, tweet about, and otherwise digitally interact with the performances taking place in front of them. For James R. Ball, III, this courting of the world of social media ‘modeled a particular form of 21st-century spectatorship’, in which audiences negotiate ‘fractured access to the spectacle of world affairs and an oscillating engagement with its players and events’ (2013: 166). Two years later in Adelaide, the critic Jane Howard assembled an ‘almost live review’ from such online fragments, linking together tweets and Instagram posts from the audience with her own reflections written during the show’s breaks (2014). Through this collaborative account, readers could see a snapshot of Caesar’s (Hugo Koolschijn’s) dead body, simultaneously splayed on the floor and magnified overhead on the screen, or a furtive glimpse of Cleopatra (Chris Nietvelt), champagne glass in hand, well on her way to ‘getting hammered’ (ibid.). These digital peepholes extended Roman Tragedies ’ fundamental preoccupation with the way media filters and focuses one’s perspective, as well as the questionable sense of empowerment that comes with it. Writing about the show after its return to London in 2017, Peter Kirwan concluded that ‘This production, more than any other I’ve seen, taps into the modern experience of engaging with the world on one’s own terms, granting (the perception or illusion of?) agency in a way few companies are bold enough to’ (2017). While such ideas informed Roman Tragedies from its inception, it is striking how powerfully they registered a decade on, in what for Kirwan was a ‘second view’ (he had also seen and written about the show in 2009). Perhaps this was because such concerns were all the more pertinent in a culture now enmeshed in the technologies and practices of social media, which by ‘optimizing’ content for its users at once draws them closer to what they believe they are interested in and cuts them off from experiences that are less familiar and more challenging. In Roman Tragedies, audiences were likewise invited to optimize their own viewing experience by moving around between and even during scenes, glancing between the in-person action and its representation on screen, and capturing aspects of the show on their phones. As is so often the case with social media usage, attention was split in the hopes of seeing and experiencing more.

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The phenomenon of digital personalization, and the uncertain agency that attends it, also featured centrally in National Theatre Wales’ Coriolan/us , which came into being as part of the UK’s 2012 Olympic celebrations and the cultural funding that supported them. In its creative ambition, epic scale, and technological inventiveness, the production bore many similarities to Roman Tragedies, but it differed significantly in at least two ways: it was an intensely time-limited and site-specific affair, playing for just over a week in the Vale of Glamorgan. Under the direction of Pearson and Brookes, famed for their collaborative, site-specific work, the project combined Shakespeare’s play with lines from Bertoldt Brecht’s unfinished adaptation, Coriolan, and made extensive use of live film, projected video, and mediated sound in its storytelling. For two unbroken hours, audience members could roam the hangar’s ‘lofty, clamorous space’, at once ‘voluminous and claustrophobic’, and witness the drama erupting in its different corners (Clapp 2012; Hemming 2012). It was their choice whether they followed the action in person, physically moving to it when the scene shifted, or whether they took it in through the live video feeds being relayed to the two large screens suspended from the ceiling. In its interest in how Shakespeare works ‘in the era of 24-hour news, of celebrity culture, and of a new global politics’, as well as in the kinds of media it used to pursue such questions, Coriolan/us echoed many of the concerns explored in Roman Tragedies (‘Coriolan/us ’ 2021). One significant difference, however, was its use of individualized, in-ear audio feeds: as audience members arrived at the hangar, they were given radio headsets to wear for the duration of the performance, through which they could hear the production’s lines, music, and sound effects (Fig. 4.3). For Susan Bennett and Julie Sanders, the strangeness of sonically isolating oneself while at the theatre, an art form so often aligned with the idea of shared experience, was palpable: it was ‘an act that surely divided us’, they wrote, ‘even as we formed a crowd’ (2013: 575). Like commuters on a train, spectators were at once together, and in another sense apart, plugged into their own aural worlds. The initial reasons for the headsets were pragmatic, but they soon gave rise to new creative possibilities. According to Pearson, ‘the hangar had a ten-second echo, almost impossible and prohibitively expensive to control’, and this challenge led to the decision to transmit the production’s soundscape individually to each audience member (2016: 287). With the actors miked and the audio carefully monitored, there was ‘no

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Fig. 4.3 Audience members watching Coriolanus (Richard Lynch) while wearing headsets and with hanging screens in the background in Coriolan/us (2012), directed by Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson for National Theatre Wales (Photograph by Mark Douet and reproduced courtesy of National Theatre Wales)

need [for the cast] to project their words or indeed their actions towards any particular audience’ (ibid.). Exchanges could be played quietly, or even entirely inside the caravans and cars located throughout the hangar, without loss of audibility. The ambient music that underscored the production—full of soft, whirring drones and percussive stabs—could also be mixed directly into the audio feed, helping produce something akin to a filmic ‘soundtrack’ that ‘drove emotional response’ (Bennett and Sanders 2013: 576). The scene that led to Coriolanus’s (Richard Lynch’s) banishment, for instance—often performed as a very loud and public argument, as in Roman Tragedies and the 2014 Donmar production—was here played as a tense and largely veiled conversation in the back of a van, with Sicinius (Nia Gwynne) almost whispering her accusation to Coriolanus that he is ‘a traitor to the people’ (3.3.69). At the same time, the

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faint sound of syncopated drumming, like a wooden crank slowly being turned, produced a feeling of ominous propulsion in the gaps in between characters’ lines. The effect was at once naturalistic and cinematic, with audiences attending to private, even closeted, scenes played in hushed, suspenseful tones. Although most spectators stayed roughly proximate to one another, moving around the hangar more or less en masse in order to remain physically close to the performance, others opted for more a more separate viewing experience, taking one of the seats placed around the edges of the space and watching the action either at a distance or through the video screens. As with Roman Tragedies, audiences had to make choices about what and how they watched: ‘although there was always something to listen to or look at’, Pearson writes, ‘there was never one place from which to see it all panoptically, in toto, as on the proscenium stage’ (2016: 288). While such arrangements did, in many ways, turn audience members into physically ‘active agent[s]’ who had to ‘negotiat[e] their own presence’ and ‘generat[e their] own degree of spectatorship’, they also drew attention to how modern communications media simultaneously make their users into subjects and objects (ibid.: 287–8). In his review of the production, Alun Thomas noted the ‘disquieting’ effects of being ‘caught in the background of shots’ that were relayed large on the screens above: ‘as spectators craning through windows realize they can be seen by everyone and move away’, they are abashed and swiftly ‘replaced by others’, who perform this embarrassment anew (2013: 53). Through such moments, Coriolan/us invited audiences to reflect on the ways in which consumers of rolling news coverage and other real-time media feeds are at once witnesses to, participants in, and subjects of the ‘conjoined world of celebrity and surveillance’ (Pearson 2016: 287). Such a culture thrives not only on the desire to see into the lives of others, but also on a lack of recognition of how those doing the watching may quickly become subjects of observation themselves. With new forms of agency come new forms of exposure. Just as it was no coincidence that the avant-garde productions described in the previous section all used Hamlet to explore questions about human volition and technology, it was deliberate and fitting that van Hove, Pearson, and Brookes looked to Shakespeare’s Roman plays to investigate the changing nature of spectatorship in a heavily mediatized culture and its impact on political engagement. They are not the only ones: Lepage would go on to stage his own highly naturalistic and

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spectacularly intermedial Coriolanus at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in 2018, incorporating WhatsApp messaging, radio call-in shows, frenzied media coverage, and cinematic scene-scapes into what one reviewer characterized as ‘essentially a live film’ (Green 2018). The relations between technology, politics, and the people figured prominently in each of these productions, which found in Shakespeare’s Roman plays a precedent for exploring the travel of information in highly political and polemicized public spheres—known as ‘forums’ long before the advent of the online kind. Coriolanus and Julius Caesar in particular foreground the difficult relations between the ruling class and the citizens they ostensibly lead, with wilful misrepresentation, hasty judgement, and rhetorical coercion playing influential roles in the battle for power that each text dramatizes. And while Roman Tragedies and Coriolan/us cut most of their plays’ citizens scenes, they effectively cast their audiences as the Roman crowd, inviting them to become the ever-present, unruly, and yet relatively submissive ‘mob’ that tries to make sense of the events that occur, supposedly on their behalf (Cole 2019: 108). By participating as mobilized, embedded ‘witnesses’, they contributed a ‘with-ness’ that Conkie has characterized as ‘constitutive’ of these complexly intermedial productions’ ‘performative force’ (2016: 108). That some spectators left feeling excited and empowered by this experience, and others uncertain about their role within it, mirrored in a small but powerful way the much larger question of whether digital media encourages democratic participation in the public sphere or in fact obstructs it. Perhaps the biggest contribution, then, that these two productions made to the intermedial performance of Shakespeare in the twentyfirst century was its overt politicization. By mapping the modalities of twenty-four-hour news and continuous media feeds onto the world of Shakespeare’s Roman plays, the productions highlighted the central role that modern technologies play in the understanding and shaping of political action, as well as the continued relevance that Shakespeare’s texts might hold for contemporary audiences. Furthermore, by immersing highly familiar and even mundane forms of technology into the heightened context of Shakespearean language and drama, they encouraged audiences to see these tools in new and estranging ways. Looking to a video feed or social media post to peer into Cleopatra’s more dismal moments, or to listen, voyeur-like, to the execution of Coriolanus cast such media in a freshly compromised light. In this way, the juxtaposition of Shakespearean text and modern media generated a kind of cognitive

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dissonance—or, in more Brechtian terms, a distancing effect. In both cases, the mode of witnessing the story, and the ethical and political problems it raised, ended up being just as important as the story itself.

4.3

The Microscopic Gaze

In his final book, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes explored the troubled relationship between photographic images and the prying eyes of others, arguing that ‘the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public’ (2000: 98). With the increasingly easy ability to create and exchange images, he writes, comes ‘a new social value’ in which interiority is no longer the property of the individual but rather something to be consumed collectively (ibid.). While Barthes himself saw still and moving pictures as fundamentally distinct, there’s no question that the public availability of personal images, and the scrutiny applied to them, has only intensified in an age of instantly sharable, digital video. Such a scenario brings with it political consequences, as shown in the previous section, while also opening up new possibilities for aesthetics and affectivity. This latter potential is what preoccupied Barthes most: his meditations on the nature of photography gave rise to his notion of the ‘punctum’, or the emotional ‘sting, speck, cut, little hole’ that images create in their viewers and thereby become meaningful (ibid.: 27). Theatre directors have often been drawn to video technology for precisely these reasons. Through the lens of the camera and its power to look closely, moments of live performance that might otherwise go unnoticed become newly affecting and significant. Such methods were certainly at work in both van Hove’s and Pearson and Brookes’s mediated landscapes. By zooming in on characters’ faces in charged moments, the video feeds in their productions invited audiences to look intently, and very often emotionally, at the dramatic action taking place. In this sense, they utilized televisual and filmic techniques that are similar to those discussed in the previous chapter on theatre broadcasts, despite the fact that their audiences were present in the same room. This section considers another pair of Shakespearean productions that used live video to reframe elements of its stage action for screens, and the emotional and ethical impact of such mediation. By inviting their audiences to look not only closely, but also doubly or even triply at certain aspects of performance, these productions turned their actors into objects of visual interest while also amplifying emotional currents that might have

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otherwise gone unnoticed. At first glance, the primary aim of such video seems to be enhanced access to details of a performance that are at once significant and fleeting. The screen enlarges and makes intimate a character’s tears, furrowed eyebrow, or twinkling eye, and in doing so turns such shimmers of emotionality into something more legible and momentous for its audiences. But as Walter Benjamin notes, ‘The enlargement of a snapshot’—or zooming lens of a video camera—‘does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject’ (1999: 229–30). Like a microscope, the camera brings to light and in a sense creates information not otherwise available, redefining spectators’ understanding of the subject matter they are watching and their relationship to it. When this subject matter is another human being, very often in (simulated) pain, the close up of the camera enables viewers to observe the subtleties of an actor’s skilful performance, while also prompting questions about the ethics of finding one’s own punctum in the suffering of others. Such questions are all the more pertinent and troubling, I will argue, when the ‘others’ being depicted are characters and performers of colour, who are further subjected to racialized thinking and the violence of the white gaze. The Young Vic’s 2015 Measure for Measure, directed by Joe HillGibbins, made extensive use of live video in its heavily cut and gritty take on Shakespeare’s tragicomedy. Against a stage heaving with inflatable sex dolls, the production’s triptych-like backdrop regularly illuminated with a mix of sacred and profane imagery. This included holy icons from Renaissance paintings, pop-art-style pastiches of the sex dolls’ astonished faces, and real-time video footage of elements of the live performance taking place both on stage and off. For the theatre critic Henry Hitchings, the result was a ‘fresh, strange and irreverent’ production in which ‘A play often portrayed as being about the limits of the law’ was instead presented as an investigation into ‘the limits of privacy’ (2015). Video sequences were the source of much humour in this Measure, but they often generated their effects at the expense of individual characters’ dignity, a compromise illustrated most clearly in the playful sex tape that catastrophically exposed Juliet and Claudio’s affair. But it was through a series of video confessions—or, more accurately, confrontations—that the probing nature of the camera lens became most powerfully apparent. At the end of the play’s opening scene, the Duke (Zubin Varla) exited through a door in the set’s upstage wall, and as it shut video footage from

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the room hidden behind came into view on the backdrop’s central panel. From here, the production went straight into Act One, scene three, in which the Duke visits Friar Thomas and explains his decision to abdicate his powers to Angelo. This off-stage, on-screen exchange was played as a dark and tense confession, with a low drone humming in the background and paintings of the wounded Christ framing the CCTV-like video feed. As the Duke approached the Friar, he looked into the camera that his confessor held and began with a line not in the Shakespearean text: ‘Forgive me father, for I have sinned’. At the same time, the video projection faded to a close up of the Duke’s troubled face, captured by the Friar’s camera, as he enumerated Vienna’s sins and by association his own. When he came to his request that the Friar disguise him in ‘the habit’ of the holy brotherhood so that he might set things right in the city, the Duke reached out his hands and grasped the camera (1.3.46). It was through this tool of surveillance, the production suggested, that his purifying work would be done. The next three times the audience saw the Duke it was with this ‘habit’ of choice in hand. In his exchange with the heavily pregnant Juliet (Natalie Simpson), he began by pointing his camera at her and asking, ‘Repent you, fair one, of the sin you carry?’, before slowly and menacingly approaching her (2.3.20). Trapped as she was against a panel to the right of the stage, Juliet’s only means of resisting this intrusion was to turn away and cover her face with her arm. Her efforts, however, were in vain: already her real-time image was being enlarged and projected on the panel to the left of the stage and then again, further back and more faintly, in the now visible backstage room. Through these magnified portraits of a woman in pain, the audience could behold the visual details of Juliet’s defeated and increasingly angry responses to the Duke’s questions, as well as her visceral grief when she learned that her partner Claudio ‘must die tomorrow’ (2.3.39). This was not the first time Hill-Gibbins showed an interest in the more sinister, voyeuristic potential of looking at someone through the lens of a camera. As Aebischer has demonstrated, he used cameras in a similar, albeit more violent, way in his 2013 Edward II at the National Theatre. In that production, ‘live video of Edward projected his suffering onto the frame of the stage with relentless insistence’, and ultimately revealed the camera to be ‘an active instrument of torture’ (Aebischer 2020: 102, 107). In Hill-Gibbins’s Measure, the Duke’s exchange with Juliet likewise

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became a scene of interrogation and violation through a camera, with Juliet’s suffering writ large for both the Duke and the audience to witness, scrutinize, and to a certain extent possess. Such dynamics recalled Susan Sontag’s thoughts on the strangely acquisitive nature of ‘taking’ someone’s picture. ‘To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed’, she wrote, producing a form of ownership ‘that feels like knowledge— and, therefore, like power’ (Sontag 1977: 4). The fact that this Juliet was played by a young, physically diminutive, mixed-race actor only intensified the sense that the Duke’s unrelenting gaze was a tool of oppressive, exploitative, hegemonic control—an issue to which the production would soon return. The Duke’s quest for reconstituted power in Vienna, aided by camera’s probing eye, continued in his subsequent encounters with Pompey, Lucio, and Claudio. In Hill-Gibbins’s reordered script, the Duke’s confrontation with the first two occurred directly after his scene with Juliet, and visually it provided its bookend: as the live action played out to the left of the stage, the relayed video materialized to the right and back. But the emotional tenor was far more flippant this time around, with Lucio (John Mackay) leaning into the camera and making eyes at it as he brazenly exited the stage. He might be exposed by its unwelcome gaze, his defiant actions suggested, but never mastered. It wasn’t until the Duke’s third and final interview, then, that the appropriative force of the camera reached its peak. This time he entered with an assistant, who filmed Claudio (Ivanno Jeremiah) centre stage as the Duke crossed in front of them and delivered his ‘Be absolute for death’ speech to the audience (3.1.5). Although Claudio’s physical presence was obscured by both the Duke and the production’s dim lighting, magnified video projections of his face appeared prominently in both the left- and right-hand panels on the stage, in the same spaces where Christ’s sacrificed body had appeared during the Duke’s earlier confession (Fig. 4.4). The effect was at once to align Claudio with this figure of holy sacrifice and to turn him into a work of visual art—to literally make him part of the scenery. For while a similar motif had been building in the previous scenes, the fact that Claudio had so very few lines to say; that the Duke barely looked at him as he recited his screed; that his expression was so impassive throughout, almost as if he were standing for a portrait; and that his nearly static image appeared so forcefully, symmetrically, and beautifully on both sides of the stage worked to render him more as an objet d’art than as an individually psychologized human being.

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Fig. 4.4 The Duke (Zubin Varla) and Claudio (Ivanno Jeremiah), enlarged and reproduced, in Measure for Measure (2015), directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins for the Young Vic (Photograph by Keith Pattison and reproduced courtesy of him)

I noted earlier that Barthes categorically distinguished between photography and cinema, principally on the grounds that only the former captures its subject in a moment of stillness and arrest—something that Barthes called ‘the pose’ (2000: 78). Such motionlessness contributed to Barthes’s sense that the photograph is a kind of ‘Death in person’, in which ‘others—the Other—do not dispossess me of myself, they turn me, ferociously, into an object, they put me at their mercy, at their disposal, classified into a file’ (ibid.: 14). Although Claudio, like many other characters in Hill-Gibbins’s production, was ‘captured’, so to speak, on video, the way in which his relayed image approached photography generated a different kind of personhood, available more for the pleasure of the spectator than the expansion of the subject. In this sense, Claudio’s treatment in the scene resembled that of the numerous leaders who met their end in Roman Tragedies: lying prone in a part of the stage that Kirwan referred to as the ‘death chamber’, they were each videoed from above until their moving image froze into a still

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photograph and they became ‘schematic representations of themselves’, an entire life ‘reduc[ed] … to a single image’ (Kirwan 2017; Mancewicz 2014: 142). Like insects on a pin, these figures were turned into icons of historical and aesthetic interest that the spectator could scrutinize, admire, collect, and consume. Although Claudio did not, in contrast, ever die, he was subject to a similarly dehumanizing scrutiny that seized upon his image even as it disregarded his personhood. The fact that in this production a Black actor played the character made such dynamics even more uncomfortable and troubling. Here was a dignified, innocent man, subjected to wrongful imprisonment and very public violations of dignity and privacy: a deeply unjust and distressingly familiar scenario that by 2015 had gained worldwide attention through the Black Lives Matter movement. As they gazed on his image, the audience became complicit in a racialized mode of surveillance that strips liberties from those presumed other in order to reaffirm the privilege, and supposed security, of those in power. While Measure for Measure is not the only Shakespearean play to dramatize the stifling pressures of a hegemonic surveillance state— Hamlet , and many of the history plays, also activate such concerns—it does so in a particularly sordid, voyeuristic manner. In the UK, Simon McBurney’s 2004 staging, co-produced by the National Theatre and Complicité, likewise used projections to highlight the ‘endless surveillance’ that shapes human life in a ‘belligerently creepy, even nasty’ Vienna (Billington 2004; Wolf 2004). Ten years later, Rob Conkie found himself immersed in a ‘locative, mobile and site-responsive’ adaptation of Measure for Measure, entitled Since I Suppose, which turned audiences into ‘Dukelike voyeurs’ who used their smartphones to follow characters through the streets, strip clubs, and crumpled hotel beds of Melbourne (2017: 231, 244). Hill-Gibbins’s production continued in this tradition of reading Measure for Measure as a grim fantasy of human subjugation, enabled by technologies of control, coercion, and exploitation. Where it differed was in the way it foregrounded racialized as well as gendered otherness, drawing attention to the way modern media cultures frame race and identity for global audiences. If Hill-Gibbins’s Measure took living, vital, and distressingly othered characters and arrested them in the objecthood of the still image, then the second production considered in this section, Spymonkey’s 2016 The Complete Deaths , did almost the exact opposite: it took a seemingly inanimate, peripheral, and unraced object—in this case, a plastic fly—and

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invested it with personhood through the mobility and focus of the moving image. Written and directed by Tim Crouch, The Complete Deaths was a comic pastiche that presented all seventy-five of Shakespeare’s on-stage deaths over the course of two hours. This four-person show debuted at the Brighton Festival in May, as part of the celebrations surrounding the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and then toured the UK and parts of the world. At the start of the production, one of the performers (Petra Massey) buzzed a small plastic fly attached to a stick around the body and face of another company member (Stephan Freiss), who lay motionless on the floor. At the same time, Massey used her free hand to film the journey of the fly with a small video camera, about the size of a hand-held microphone, while its footage was relayed to a large screen suspended across the back of the stage. Although this pre-show business was primarily for humorous effect—Massey flew the insect into her fellow cast member’s ear, mouth, and groin, much to the audible delight and disgust of the audience, before swapping positions with Freiss—it also established the means by which the life of the fly would be both parodied and exalted. As befit a blackly comic production obsessed with death, described by one reviewer as ‘a whistle-stop tour of extinction’, the fly became a recurring motif in Spymonkey’s irreverent and erudite staging of Shakespearean carnage (Hemming 2016). According to cast member Toby Park, who assumed the role of the self-important intellectual within the context of the production, the insect was a ‘serious symbol of mortality’ intended to stir the audience out of its ‘well-fed, bourgeois complacency’. While these lines involved a good deal of tongue-in-cheek humour—one was delivered to Freiss dressed in an elaborate and ridiculous fly costume, after all—they also conveyed an element of truth that the camera and its real-time video display repeatedly explored. This was perhaps most evident in the staging of the death of Clarence from Richard III , who infamously drowns in a barrel of malmsey wine. In The Complete Deaths , Clarence and his murderers were played by three plastic flies, which congregated on a microphone while Park recited the scene’s lines over a melodramatic soundtrack of plaintive strings. As he did so, two of his castmates comically batted the lo-fi puppets around each other while the third filmed the miniature attack for up-close viewing on the screen above. The audience tittered with laughter as the two murderers at last flew their victim towards a glass of water and plunged

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him into its depths: here was Clarence, ‘scattered in the bottom of the sea’, a bathetic death for a measly fly (1.4.28). The humour, of course, was in the fact that this grand, emotional drama was performed by cheap effigies of insects that most people swat at with little regard. As Park mock-sombrely pronounced at the end of the scene, quoting King Lear, ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;/ They kill us for their sport’ (4.1.37–8). And yet, the intimate perspective created by the camera did invite a mode of watching that cued identification and empathy from the viewer, even as the subject matter being displayed caricatured such sentiment. Had the joke ended here, or continued in the same vein, the overall effect would have been one of playful satire, both of the idea of the tragic stage death—ultimately a studied fiction—and the mawkishness of the filmic close up—a clichéd short-cut to manufactured feeling. But the fly kept coming back, and ultimately with a difference: just before the interval, the screen presented recorded footage of a real fly inching across a white background, which appeared again after the break. While the insect’s plastic counterpart would return in the second act, it was the death of the living version that closed the show. After a performance of the final scene of Hamlet , the mournful strings from the Clarence sequence returned and with them more video of the real fly, this time on its back. According to the LED board above the screen, this was the ‘black ill-favoured fly’ from Titus Andronicus that meets its end at the point of Marcus’s knife, another ‘Poor harmless … innocent’ casually slaughtered in a notoriously bloody play (3.2.56, 63, 66). Although the prevailing mood of the scene was once again comic, with spectators laughing at the fly’s reappearance and the sounding of the buzzer that eventually signalled its end, the stretch of time in between these moments took a curiously poignant turn. For almost sixty seconds, the audience watched in silence as an ostensibly living creature struggled against death, flailing its legs, attempting to right itself, and finally going still. Through the magnifying powers of the camera, an everyday form of mortality, usually experienced as trivial and even desired, metamorphosed into something more harrowing, if only for a minute. The fact that below the screen lay four human bodies—the leftover carnage from Hamlet —at once intensified the anthropomorphic suffering of the fly and undercut the significance of any individual tragedy, be it human, entomological, or otherwise.

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While the overriding mood of this scene was black comedy laced with pathos, it also raised difficult questions about the nature of mediated spectatorship in both the theatre and everyday life, much like the Young Vic’s Measure for Measure. Modern digital culture is in so many ways a supremely visual phenomenon, with constant streams of still and moving images flowing through official media networks as well as more illicit ones. Sontag, like Barthes, recognized the personal and ethical costs of such documentation, which turns individual experience into public spectacle. Reflecting on photographs that depict the suffering of others, she wrote, [T]here is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it … or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. (Sontag 2003: 35–6)

Though Sontag—once again like Barthes—was adamant that such ethical quandaries are at their most fraught within the context of photography, one wonders what these critics would have made of the extraordinary proliferation of video in the smartphone age had they been alive to experience it. It is now the moving image, more than anything, that provides spectators with voyeuristic access to the pain of others, as the numerous videos of police brutality that have emerged since the 2010s have made terribly clear. Of course, the video of the dying fly in The Complete Works was in no way as devastating or consequential as such footage, but neither was it entirely unconnected. Like videos of real people in real pain, this staged footage presented the suffering of another and asked viewers to consider their role in relation to it: as empathetic onlooker, incidental witness, outraged ally, or culpable participant. Such connections become more trenchant when one considers David Sterling Brown’s analysis of the fly in Titus as a proxy for Aaron and his child and the racist aggression they endure. When Marcus excuses his violence against the fly by likening it to ‘the empress’ Moor’, Brown argues that he establishes a ‘substitution’ by which ‘Aaron metaphorically enters Titus’ domestic space, but not as a welcome guest and certainly not as a human being’ (2019: 120). Aaron, the fly, and all figures of Blackness in Titus are dehumanized and othered, making any representation

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of their suffering a highly charged experience. While such documentation draws sharp attention to violence that might otherwise go unseen, it also contributes to what the journalist Kelly Hayes has described as ‘the constantly replayed spectacle of Black death, which has arguably done little to slow the pace of police violence’ (2015). Writing five years later in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Jelani Cobb likewise questioned whether ‘the burgeoning genre of videos capturing the deaths of black Americans … do[es] more to humanize or to objectify the unwilling figures at the center of their narratives’ (2020). As long as the violence they expose persists, it is impossible to champion their power to catalyse change, both in terms of society at large and the way the person depicted within them is seen. While it is unlikely that such issues directly shaped the development of The Complete Deaths , particularly considering its comic aims and the date and context of its creation, they nevertheless inform a wider consideration of what it means to view the experiences of others—and especially their suffering—through the lens of a camera. In both this production and in Measure for Measure, the use of live video made the emotional life of particular characters more legible, vivid, and stirring for spectators. But with the magnification afforded by cameras also came a growing awareness of the disconcerting ways in which the images they produce not only ‘fiddle with the scale of the world’, to quote Sontag again, but also fiddle with the relationship between the person who is doing the looking and the one who is being looked at (1977: 4). In the case of The Complete Deaths , looking microscopically at the fly helped bring it to life, both in the sense of animating a seemingly inert object (the plastic fly) and of bestowing the gravitas of personhood on a largely devalued but nevertheless living creature (the real fly). And yet, the end result was still the abjection and death of a momentarily vital presence. In Measure for Measure, something at once different and related occurred: here, the steady gaze of the camera took possession of its subjects, exposing their pain to public scrutiny and turning it into an object of aesthetic pleasure. In both instances, cameras and the images they produced worked like a fulcrum between subjecthood and objecthood, at times investing their subjects with vibrancy and life and elsewhere draining these qualities from them. Such dynamics were all the more powerful, and troubling, when those subjects were framed by and for the white gaze. In such moments, the task for the audience was less about attending to character-making within the theatre, and more

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about recognizing how they are complicit in the unmaking of real people outside of it.

4.4

Alienation and/or Splendour

Perhaps the most potent and generalizable feature of intermedial theatremaking is the way it recalibrates audiences’ experiences of overly familiar technology, making accustomed sights, practices, and power structures feel newly and uncomfortably strange. This applies both to the subjects of the technology, such as the faces and bodies of characters being reframed and recodified for the screen, and to the technology itself, which when presented on the stage often loses some of the nonchalance and banality that have accumulated around it in everyday life. When it comes to the performance of Shakespeare’s plays, there is often a further element of the culturally strange, or at least distant—a historical text, performed in archaic language—becoming newly familiar, or at least more culturally recognizable, through the presence of modern technologies. The most rigorous intermedial stagings constantly probe at this tension between the familiar and the strange, and the feelings of boredom and wonder, alienation and splendour, that they can provoke. In its most productive moments, the staging of technology stealthily disrupts engrained expectations about how the space, emotion, and events of drama reveal themselves to audiences, to dazzling effects. In its less successful or at least less focused instantiations, such intermediality can confuse and blur experience, producing a multi-sensory and even spectacular form of theatre that nevertheless underwhelms. Toying with the risks involved in eliciting such complex and at times contradictory feelings is one of the areas in which avant-garde theatre most excels. This connection accounts at least in part for the longer tradition of intermedial experimentation within the more radical approaches to performance that I discussed at the start of this chapter. While the rest of the chapter has focused on more narrative-driven, and thus somewhat more mainstream, iterations of technology-rich Shakespeare, it is worth pausing to acknowledge the persistence of avant-garde explorations in the later twenty-first century, and to consider the ways in which they emphatically foreground the slippage between states of alienation and splendour.

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I highlighted in Chapter 1 how Dorsen’s A Piece of Work simultaneously baffled and intrigued its critics, using a computer algorithm to remake Hamlet in a very live—if not always alive—way. The result, according to Thomas Cartelli, was ‘the kind of production one finds more pleasure in recounting than experiencing’, a response that bears some kinship to the nineteenth-century writer William Nye’s quip that ‘Richard Wagner’s music is better than it sounds’ (Cartelli 2016: 456; Gracyk 2013: 36). But what is perhaps most notable about A Piece of Work and its use of technology was the way that it tested audiences’ capacity, and indeed desire, for meaning-making in the absence of some of theatre’s most familiar signatures: narrative, actors’ embodied presence, and human directorial agency. Spectators who left the production enlivened tended to point to moments of unexpected clarity, in which new meaning emerged from the re-churned text, while those who left frustrated typically stressed its lack of coherence. This polarization of audiences, and in particular the deliberate courting of both their disaffection and their wonder, is a common feature of much avant-garde art, and intermedial workings of Shakespeare are no exception. An especially vivid example of such divisive effects was The Wooster Group’s second engagement with Shakespeare, which came a few years after its Hamlet through a collaboration in 2012 with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) (again, part of the cultural celebrations that surrounded the UK’s Olympic year). This time, the much obscurer Troilus and Cressida was the source text, with Wooster Group company members playing the Trojans and RSC actors, directed separately by Mark Ravenhill, playing the Greeks. In what was undeniably a meeting of two very distinct performance styles, Wooster Group performers presented their parts as grotesque caricatures of Native American and Inuit people—the company’s take on the idea of an invaded culture— while also wearing Styrofoam moulds of Greek statuary strapped to their backs and surrounded by television monitors displaying an amalgamation of different films (Fig. 4.5). As is typical of the company’s ‘established house practice’, actors wore head mics with in-ear feeds, ‘“found objects”’ from popular culture often took precedence over the play text, and imitative, formally meticulous movements replaced any attempt at naturalistic presentation (Cartelli 2013: 239; Fowler 2014: 208). All this stood in stark contrast to the RSC actors’ far more straightforward interpretation of the Greeks, which Cartelli described as ‘queer to the hilt, cynical to a fault, and faultlessly spoken’ (2013: 234).

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Fig. 4.5 Troilus (Scott Shepherd) standing in front of a tepee and mounted video monitors in Troilus and Cressida (2012), co-directed by Elizabeth LeCompte and Mark Ravenhill for The Wooster Group and the Royal Shakespeare Company (Photograph by Hugo Glendinning © RSC and reproduced courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company)

Audience responses to such a display were extreme, and to an extent mixed: as Paul Prescott said of the project’s debut in Stratford-uponAvon, ‘Many will remember this, with a shudder, as the worst Troilus they have ever seen … a few will remember it as the best’ (2015: 213). Much of the dissention focused on The Wooster Group’s presentation of Native American and Inuit identity, an issue bound up in its engagement with popular culture and technological mediation. From the several, relatively small television screens located around the stage came scenes from the films Smoke Signals (1998) and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), both created by Indigenous directors from the US and Canada and focusing on the histories and experiences of Native people in those countries. Audio from these films, plus Elia Kazan’s teenage melodrama, Splendor in the Grass (1961)—in this production an intertext for Troilus and

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Cressida’s doomed love affair—was mixed live into The Wooster Group actors’ earpieces and guided many of their performance choices. Dressed in stereotypical ‘Indian’ wigs and costumes, the actors mimicked the vocal tones and physical movements of characters in the films, frequently delivering their lines to the television screens in a ‘gentle, sing-songy and slightly stoned accent’ that, according to company stalwart Kate Valk, was their way of ‘“say[ing] it like Indians”’ (ibid.; Hollis 2017). The result was a complex, arcane, and for some offensive project that was far more interested in questions of national mythology and cultural identity than in elucidating the Shakespearean play text. For Benjamin Fowler, The Wooster Group’s ‘use of secondary material to break into a text’—including the heavy presence of technological mediation—made him ‘listen to Shakespeare anew’ (2014: 209). ‘[T]he actor’s reactivity in the live moment’ was ‘heighten[ed]’, he suggested, with the technology destabilizing ossified understandings of Shakespeare and allowing the drama to thrive in a freshly enlivened state (ibid.). For many others, however, the effect was quite the opposite: Michael Billington described the production as a ‘bizarrely disjointed spectacle’; Ben Brantley characterized the subsequent, Wooster-only version of the project—renamed ‘Cry, Trojans!’—as ‘befuddled and befuddling’; and Gavin Hollis criticized the way the company, ‘so invested in the ironies of post-modernity … [did not] seem aware of the depth of their own unironic complicities’ in the problems of cultural appropriation (Billington 2012; Brantley 2015; Hollis 2017). The Wooster Group’s use of technology was not the only or even central factor prompting such critiques, but it was the glue that brought such diverse and controversial elements together in this ‘Postmodern pastiche’ (Mancewitz 2014: 92). The fact that it both alienated and dazzled, though not in equal measure, illustrates the way in which intermedial theatre-making often purposely decentres expectations in an effort, not always successful, to make text and performance new. Without such technology, this troubled production arguably would have been even more problematic: the video screens and the films they transmitted helped situate The Wooster Group’s heavy-handed and arguably racist portrayal of Native American and Inuit culture within a wider web of cultural and historical referents. By mediating so many aspects of the performance, The Wooster Group drew audiences’ attention to how their own understanding of different cultures is often a product of what they see in film and television. Still, by relying so heavily—and apparently earnestly—on

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outdated and damaging stereotypes, it failed to produce insights that cut through the widespread confusion and offence. Given that The Wooster Group’s Troilus proved to be one of the most esoteric and divisive productions ever to grace the RSC stage, it may seem like a strange choice to turn next to one of the company’s biggestever productions, intended for the widest possible audience. In 2016, in collaboration with the tech-giant Intel and motion capture experts at The Imaginarium Studios, the RSC presented a digitally intensive staging of The Tempest , directed by Gregory Doran and starring Simon Russell Beale. Scheduled in the company’s Christmas slot—almost always reserved for musicals and other non-Shakespeare productions that draw large family crowds—this show represented an attempt to make Shakespeare spectacular, and in doing so to expand his popular appeal. This would be accomplished through the use of digital tools that Sarah Ellis, the company’s Director of Digital Development, described as ‘not just cutting edge’ but ‘bleeding edge technology’ (Seymour 2017). The main focus of such innovation was Ariel, Prospero’s spritely attendant and the instrument of much of the play’s magic. Using motion capture technologies originally created for film and videogames, plus a computer with ‘50-million times more memory than the one that put man on the moon’, the creative team developed a way of processing motion capture data in real time and relaying the results almost immediately to the stage (Borsuk 2019: 1). With the actor playing Ariel (Mark Quartley) costumed in a suit lined with seventeen motion sensors, data concerning the movements in every joint in his body were processed live and then projected into a luminescent, digital avatar. Two mesh clouds suspended from the ceiling received the avatar from twenty-seven projection units and moved with it, creating the impression of a three-dimensional figure that floated over the actors’ heads and, when prompted, soared through the air (‘Shakespeare’s Sprite’ 2017). While initial press coverage suggested that Quartley would perform Ariel’s movements backstage, like a puppeteer behind the curtain, Doran and his team eventually decided to locate him on stage and make him the primary embodiment of the character (Furness 2016). This meant that when the computer-generated version did appear—typically when Ariel was carrying out Prospero’s magical orders—spectators could watch both Quartley and his digital avatar inhabit the performance space at once (Fig. 4.6). The result of this ‘ménage à trois’ between Prospero, Ariel, and the avatar, as Quartley himself would later put it, was a mix of wonder,

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confusion, and at times frustration on the part of the audience (‘Prospero Meets Ariel’ 2017). On the one hand, having both Ariels on stage allowed the RSC to showcase the technology that it had developed with Intel and Imaginarium, while still maintaining a traditional focus on the live, embodied presence of the human actor. What’s more, it also let spectators see that the avatar was truly being rendered in real time and was not a pre-recorded projection. ‘[T]he gamble has paid off handsomely’, wrote Dominic Cavendish, who praised the production’s special effects as ‘true to the hype’ and ‘of a breath-taking order’ (2016). On the other hand, the twinning of Ariel created an ‘excess of presence’ that some viewers found difficult to negotiate and even distracting (Aebischer 2020: 130). Billington registered an ‘odd sense’ that came with ‘watching a double Ariel’, Kelly Fiveash noted a ‘stilted’ dynamic between the live and digital, and Dominic Maxwell bemoaned ‘the terrible, charmless trickery of the motion-capture technology’ that for him pulled attention away from Quartley’s performance (Billington 2016;

Fig. 4.6 Prospero (Simon Russell Beale), Ariel (Mark Quartley), and the digital avatar in The Tempest (2016), directed by Gregory Doran for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in collaboration with Intel and Imaginarium Studios (Photograph by Topher McGrillis © RSC and reproduced courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company)

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Fiveash 2016; Maxwell 2016). By putting both iterations of the character on stage together, the production inadvertently created a contest between the live and the digital, with the agility and charisma of human presence becoming the barometer by which the technology would be measured. Unsurprisingly, most theatre critics came down on the side of the former, concluding that the production showed how it is theatre’s ‘low tech’, ‘rough magic’, rather than any ‘kaleidoscopic visual spectacle’, ‘that makes it so enduring an artform’ (Cavendish 2016; Hitchings 2016; Billington 2016). Somewhat ironically, given the great pains the production team took to render the avatar in real time, the double staging of Ariel also facilitated a heightened scrutiny of its liveness and ultimately dissatisfaction with it. Although the technology developed for this Tempest represented a major step forward in terms of real-time motion capture, it still came with an infinitesimal time lag that did not go unnoticed. ‘[T]he avatar often appears out of sync with the actor’, wrote Sophie Curtis, ‘which breaks the illusion the company is working so hard to create’ (2016). This was most apparent in the play’s banquet scene, when Ariel enters as a harpy and castigates Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio for being ‘men of sin’ (3.3.53). In Doran’s Tempest, Quartley’s Ariel stood on a raised platform to the right of the stage, while his avatar appeared as a ghoulish harpy figure that filled the backdrop and towered over the cowering actors located downstage. This was one of the few scenes in which the live avatar was projected onto the backdrop, a condition that rendered it entirely two-dimensional, and it was also the only instance in which Quartley wore headgear that mapped the movements of his face. This meant that in this scene the avatar was at once particularly large and visible, and that its facial expressions followed those of Quartley. The fact that the movements of its mouth did not match entirely with Quartley’s delivery of Ariel’s lines, then, was especially apparent and dislocating, drawing attention away from the intended terror of the scene and towards the mechanics underlying its performance. This was not the only technological problem that arose. As Aebischer has illustrated through a detailed analysis of the production’s nightly show reports, the harpy instantiation of the avatar was particularly prone to malfunction. If any of the sensors in Quartley’s suit fell out of calibration, the ‘avatar’s head could be looking in the wrong direction’, or its ‘wings, torso, or legs and lower body … twisted or bent’ (2020: 131–2). Aebischer compellingly explores the subversive power of such glitches, arguing

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that they unsettled the production’s glossy, ‘illusionist spectacle’ and drew audiences into a more involving examination of Ariel’s—and ultimately theatre’s—disruptive, cyborg presence (ibid.: 119). But in terms of what the creative team intended for the production, the glitches were mistakes that moved the scene out of the realm of splendour and into one of critical distance and alienation. In the pursuit of liveness, perhaps theatre’s most celebrated quality in the digital age, other virtues associated with stage performance—creative freedom, suspension of disbelief, and affective pleasure—were inadvertently relegated. Some might argue that this is no bad thing: as Aebischer suggests, an overemphasis on ‘spectatorial plenitude’ can bring with it an assumption that art should ‘please but not challenge’ (ibid.: 3, 121). But there is also a case to be made for the emotional and intellectual power of the truly spectacular, which like the Latin root in Miranda’s name invites audiences ‘to look at with wonder’, and in doing so recalibrate their understanding of what theatre can do, both in a technical and experiential sense (OED: ‘mire, v.2’). The mixed results produced by Doran’s Tempest suggest that an overarching emphasis on liveness as the sine qua non of theatre might be misguided, at least when it comes to creating wondrous, absorbing, and dramatically rich modes of performance. It is telling, for instance, that some of the most startling and impactful moments in van Hove’s Roman Tragedies, and his subsequent Shakespearean adaptation, Kings of War, occurred through the deliberate disruption of traditional theatrical values, including time and space. In Kings of War, which premiered in 2015 and amalgamated Henry V , the Henry VI plays, and Richard III into a single, four-and-a-half hour-long drama, one of the most arresting sequences in the live video feed was when it was suddenly not live. Like Roman Tragedies, this production featured a large, central screen that displayed key moments of performance from angles and distances otherwise unavailable to the audience (in contrast to Roman Tragedies, however, spectators stayed seated in the auditorium for the entire show). While some of the video shown on the screen relayed moments simultaneously happening on stage, much of it came from action taking place in the set’s backstage corridor, which seemed to stretch across the entire upstage space and was fully obscured from the audience’s unmediated view. Spectators were therefore dependent on the video footage shot by camera operators, also located in the corridor, to see the backroom dealings that happened there, including the murders of several characters.

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The question of whether this video was live or pre-recorded was one that van Hove and his collaborators toyed with throughout. As Howard described in her review for The Guardian, ‘streams of [on-stage] conversations transferred to twisting white hallways [backstage] where a corner is turned and suddenly the space is filled with dead bodies or a rave’ (2018). The appearance of such displays was at once spectacular and engrossing. As soon as spectators felt they had a handle on the screen grammar, technical makeup, and functional purpose of the video feed, it changed—though the liveness of the screened material still appeared to remain intact. Entrances and exits corresponded between what appeared on stage and in the video, and smoke billowed from the hidden corridor onto the visible stage space when battle scenes materialized on screen. The synchronization of these two worlds suggested that they were, in fact, continuous with one another and mutually (a)live. All this changed, however, halfway into the production and just before its interval. Dismayed by the conflict that had by now erupted all around him, and cowed by his treatment at the hands of Margaret, Edward, and other members of his family, Eelco Smits’s gangly Henry VI began his famous soliloquy about wishing himself a ‘homely … shepherd’, seated quietly on a ‘molehill’, on the visible portion of the stage (Henry VI , part 3, 2.5.3, 14, 22). Midway through he paused and exited upstagecentre into the hidden corridor, where he was filmed by the live camera and projected onto the main screen. But as he rounded the corner of this eerily bright, byzantine space, a herd of sheep suddenly appeared, crowding their way through the hall and huddling around Henry as they coaxed his wistful daydream into life. The immediate effect of such a surprising moment was to generate fresh confusion about how this and other video sequences in the production had been constructed, and in doing so to disrupt underlying assumptions about liveness as a guarantor of authenticity. In contrast to Doran’s Tempest, van Hove’s Kings of War celebrated the theatrical potential of the not live, using the sheep sequence to disturb spectators’ expectations about how the video material worked and create a moment of performance that was genuinely startling. Such a move took audiences into the imaginative world of Henry, and allowed them to consider the drama through a more symbolist register. As Frédéric Maurin has shown in his analysis of van Hove’s 2017 staging of Richard Strauss’s Salome, pre-recorded material in that opera likewise offered a way of temporarily evading the ‘reality’ of the stage and journeying into a dreamier realm

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of desire and emotional defiance (2018: 161–2). In van Hove’s take on the Henry VI plays, the disruption of liveness became a way of stepping outside of the march of history and dwelling on the more lyrical, escapist, and hypnotically absurd fantasies of the individual. If there is a gold standard when it comes to the production of intermedial theatre, then perhaps it lies in the ability to create feelings of enrapturing splendour and thought-provoking alienation at the same time. Although the two experiences often pull against one another, with one encouraging spectators to lose themselves in the sensory world of the artwork and the other to draw back in cerebral contemplation, examples like van Hove’s sheep suggest that they can work together, offering viewers something aesthetically splendid while simultaneously engaging their critical faculties. This is not to say that one without the other is not still valuable in its own right. Alienation without splendour, provided that it does not tip over into the realm of total disconnection, challenges audiences to think harder about their expectations concerning theatre, Shakespeare, or technology by deliberately upending them. That could mean removing human presence from the stage, paying more attention to intertexts than to Shakespeare’s language, or making visible the failures of digital technology, which for all its seeming magic is in fact a material, fallible, and human creation. In turn, splendour without alienation, as long as it is not so gratuitous as to provoke its own brand of disaffection in viewers, offers forms of visual, sonic, and emotional pleasure that make Shakespearean performance enjoyable for audiences, and in that sense more appealing and accessible. By privileging beauty, awe, and the forms of emotional and intellectual escape that often attend these qualities, intermedial productions that are rich in spectacular displays offer audiences a welcome release from the realities of everyday life. The danger, of course, is that they transport the viewer to nowhere in particular: the release is a temporary and ultimately vacuous one, returning audiences to their daily lives no different than when they left them. The challenge for intermedial theatremakers is in dazzling spectators while also unsettling their expectations about what theatre, and Shakespeare, can or should be. In such instances, technology on the stage is neither a form of magic nor a cheap trick. Rather, it is a lens through which audiences can see the play, the world, and themselves more clearly, and consequently are better able to make sense of all three.

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In a discussion of avant-garde deconstructions of Shakespeare, Cartelli has suggested that, ‘if one were to envision a production history of our time drafted fifty years hence, the term “intermediality” would probably dominate the discourse’ (2016: 456). Productions like The Wooster Group’s Hamlet , van Hove’s Roman Tragedies, and Dorsen’s A Piece of Work, he argues, have marked the early decades of the twenty-first century as ones profoundly concerned with the interpenetration and interdependencies of digital and ‘real’ life. For my part, I would add that, in fifty years’ time, it’s likely that the weaving of digital technologies into live theatrical performance will have become so mainstream that the word ‘intermediality’ will sound as time-bound as ‘Electronovision’, ‘Theatrofilm’, and even ‘cyberspace’ do to people now. As I have argued, technology as a language and currency constantly changes, as do people’s relation to it. Just as techniques that strike audiences as spectacular in one decade can become old-fashioned by the next, approaches that provocatively unsettle expectations about presence in the theatre may soon blend into an ever-more digitized, ever-more networked way of living and performing. If intermedial modes of theatre-making do increasingly become the norm, then what will be most spectacular about them won’t be the particular tools they use to achieve their effects. Rather, it will be the ingenuity they demonstrate as they expose how deeply everyday technologies shape, and ultimately remake, the performance of life off the stage.

Productions Consulted Crouch, Tim (2016) The Complete Deaths, in collaboration with Spymonkey, Hull Truck Theatre, 9 September [video recording subsequently accessed through the company’s online store]. Doran, Gregory (2016) The Tempest, starring Simon Russell Beale and in collaboration with Intel, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, November [video recording subsequently accessed through DramaOnline and on DVD]. Dorsen, Annie (2013) A Piece of Work, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, 21 December, video excerpts on Vimeo, https://vimeo.com/user9302488 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Hill-Gibbins, Joe (2013) Edward II , starring John Heffernan, video recording from the Olivier Theatre, London, National Theatre Archive, RNT/AE/1/1/245.

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Hill-Gibbins, Joe (2015) Measure for Measure, starring Romola Garai, Young Vic, London, November [video recording subsequently accessed through the theatre’s private online archive]. Icke, Robert (2017) Hamlet, starring Andrew Scott, Almeida Theatre, London, August. LeCompte, Elizabeth (2015) Hamlet, starring Scott Shepherd and Kate Valk, The Wooster Group, video recording from the Edinburgh International Festival, August 2013, company-produced DVD. LeCompte, Elizabeth and Mark Ravenhill (2012) Troilus and Cressida, starring Scott Shepherd, Marin Ireland, Joe Dixon, and Zubin Varla, The Wooster Group in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, August. Lepage, Robert (1997) Elsinore, video recording from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, 10 October, New York Public Library Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, NCOV 2175. Lepage, Robert (2020) Coriolanus, starring André Sills, video recording directed for screen by Barry Avrich for Stratford Festival on Film, Avon Theatre, Stratford, Ontario, accessed online through the StratFest@Home festival, April–May. Pearson, Mike and Mike Brookes (2012) Coriolan/us, starring Richard Lynch, National Theatre Wales, video recording from the Vale of Glamorgan, August, accessed through the company’s private digital archive. Tresnjak, Darko (2007), The Merchant of Venice, starring F. Murray Abraham, Theatre for a New Audience, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, March. van Hove, Ivo (2016) Kings of War, starring Eelco Smits, Ramsey Nasr, and Hans Kesting, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Barbican Theatre, London, April [video recording subsequently accessed through the company’s private online archive]. van Hove, Ivo (2017) Roman Tragedies, starring Gijs Scholten van Achat, Hugo Koolschijn, Hans Kesting, and Chris Nietvelt, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Barbican Theatre, London, 19 March [video recording subsequently accessed through the company’s private online archive]. Wilson, Robert (1986) Hamletmachine, video recording from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Spring, New York Public Library Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, NCOV 3126 Videodiscs 1–2.

Works Cited Aebischer, Pascale (2020) Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ball III, James R. (2013) ‘Staging the Twitter War: Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s Roman Tragedies ’, TDR: The Drama Review, 57:4, 163–70.

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Barthes, Roland (2000) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, London: Vintage. Benjamin, Walter (1999) Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, London: Pimlico. Bennett, Susan and Julie Sanders (2013) ‘Here/There: National Theatre Wales’s Coriolan/us ’, Contemporary Theatre Review 23:4, 574–8. Billington, Michael (2004) ‘Measure for Measure’, The Guardian, 28 May, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2004/may/28/theatre1 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Billington, Michael (2012) ‘Troilus and Cressida—Review’, The Guardian, 9 August, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/aug/09/troilus-and-cre ssida-review [accessed 15 February 2022]. Billington, Michael (2016) ‘The Tempest Review—Beale’s Superb Prospero Haunts Hi-Tech Spectacle’, The Guardian, 18 November, https://www. theguardian.com/stage/2016/nov/18/the-tempest-review-simon-russell-bea le-rsc [accessed 15 February 2022]. Borsuk, Amy (2019) ‘Innovating Shakespeare: The Politics of Technological Partnership in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Tempest (2016)’, Humanities 8:1, https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/8/1/42 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Brantley, Ben (2007) ‘Looks It Not Like the King? Well, More Like Burton’, The New York Times, 1 November, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/the ater/reviews/01haml.html [accessed 5 July 2021]. Brantley, Ben (2015) ‘Cry, Trojans!’ Is the Wooster Group’s Take on Troilus and Cressida’, The New York Times, 19 April, https://www.nytimes.com/ 2015/04/08/theater/review-cry-trojans-is-the-wooster-groups-take-on-tro ilus-and-cressida.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Brown, David Sterling (2019) ‘Remixing the Family: Blackness and Domesticity in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, in Farah Karim-Cooper (ed) Titus Andronicus: The State of Play, London: Bloomsbury, 111–27. Cartelli, Thomas (2008) ‘Channelling the Ghosts: The Wooster Group’s Remediation of the 1964 Electronovision Hamlet ’, Shakespeare Survey 61, 147–60. Cartelli, Thomas (2013) ‘“The Killing Stops Here”: Unmaking the Myths of Troy in the Wooster Group / RSC Troilus & Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly 62:2, 233–43. Cartelli, Thomas (2016) ‘Essentializing Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath: Dmitry Krymov’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It), Matías Piñeiro’s Viola, and Annie Dorsen’s Piece of Work: A Machine-Made Hamlet ’, Shakespeare Quarterly 67:4, 431–56.

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Cavendish, Dominic (2016) ‘The RSC’s Tempest: Lord of the Rings-Style Magic and the Welcome Return of Simon Russell Beale’, The Telegraph, 18 November, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/ the-rscs-incredible-tempest-brings-lord-of-the-rings-style-magic/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Clapp, Susannah (2012) ‘Coriolan/us ’, The Observer, 12 August, https://www. theguardian.com/culture/2012/aug/12/coriolanus-wales-troilus-cressidareview [accessed 15 February 2022]. Cobb, Jelani (2020) ‘The Death of George Floyd, in Context’, The New Yorker, 27 May, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-death-ofgeorge-floyd-in-context [accessed 15 February 2022]. Cole, Penelope (2019) ‘Becoming the Mob: Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson’s Coriolan/us ’, Theatre History Studies 38, 104–16. Conkie, Rob (2016) Writing Performative Shakespeares: New Forms for Performance Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conkie, Rob (2017) ‘Reverie of a Shakespearean Walker’, in James C. Bulman (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 231–49. ‘Coriolan/us: About the Show’ (2021) National Theatre Wales, https:// www.nationaltheatrewales.org/ntw_shows/coriolan-us/#about_the_show [accessed 15 February 2022]. Curtis, Sophie (2016) ‘Royal Shakespeare Company Brings CGI Ariel to the Stage in New High-Tech Production of The Tempest ’, The Mirror, 19 November, https://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/royal-shakespeare-companybrings-cgi-9285289 [accessed 15 February 2022]. De Vos, Laurens (2018) ‘Staging Shakespeare at Toneelgroep Amsterdam: Political Murders and Backroom Politics’, in Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai (eds) Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie, London: Methuen, 68–71. Dixon, Steve (2007) Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation, Cambridge: MIT Press. Fiveash, Kelly (2016) ‘The Tempest Review: Real-Time Digital Avatar Brews Storm in a Teacup’, ArsTechnica, 25 November, https://arstechnica.com/ gaming/2016/11/tempest-review-real-time-digital-avatar-performance-cap ture/?comments=1&post=32357615 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Fowler, Benjamin (2014) ‘Culture Clash: What the Wooster Group Revealed About the RSC (and British Theater Hegemony) in Troilus & Cressida’, Shakespeare Bulletin 32:2, 207–34. Furness, Hannah (2016) ‘Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made on: Ariel to Appear as “3D Digital Apparition” in RSC’s The Tempest ’, The Telegraph,

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11 January, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/such-stuff-asdreams-are-made-on-ariel-to-appear-as-3d-digital-a/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Giesekam, Greg (2007) Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in the Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Glaister, Dan (1996) ‘Fated, Not Fêted’, The Guardian, 15 August, Shakespeare Institute Newscuttings Collection. Gracyk, Theodore (2013) On Music, New York: Routledge. Green, Jesse (2018) ‘Review: At Stratford, Coriolanus Is Riveting and Troubling’, The New York Times, 18 July, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/ 07/18/theater/robert-lepage-coriolanus-stratford-review.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Gussow, Mel (1970) ‘Schechner’s Performance Group in “Commune”’, The New York Times, 21 December, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/12/ 21/archives/schechners-performance-group-in-commune.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Gussow, Mel (1986) ‘Cranking up a Powerful Hamletmachine’, The New York Times, 25 May, Shakespeare Institute Newscuttings Collection. Hayes, Kelly (2015) ‘Spectacles of Black Death and White Impunity’, Transformative Spaces, 20 November, https://transformativespaces.org/2015/ 11/20/spectacles-of-black-death-and-white-impunity/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Hemming, Sarah (2012) ‘Coriolan/us ’, Financial Times, 13 August, https:// www.ft.com/content/c7d4d8b6-e2ef-11e1-a463-00144feab49a [accessed 15 February 2022]. Hemming, Sarah (2016) ‘The Complete Deaths … Daft, and Thoughtful’, Financial Times, 16 May, https://www.ft.com/content/64788ddc-1836-11e6bb7d-ee563a5a1cc1 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Hitchings, Henry (2015) ‘Measure for Measure, Theatre Review: Corruption, Anarchy… and Inflatable Sex Dolls’, Evening Standard, 9 October, https:// www.standard.co.uk/culture/theatre/measure-for-measure-theatre-reviewcorruption-anarchy-and-inflatable-sex-dolls-a3086566.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Hitchings, Henry (2016) ‘The Tempest … Theatre’s Traditional Virtues Endure in the RSC’s Technology-Heavy Show’, Evening Standard, 18 November, https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/theatre/the-tempest-theatre-review-the atres-traditional-virtues-endure-in-the-rscs-technology-heavy-show-a3679421. html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Hollis, Gavin (2017) ‘Saying It Like “Indians”: The Wooster Group’s Cry Trojans!, Sa(l)vage Ethnography, and the Politics of “Playing Injun”’, Scene 1, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/scene/2015/04/Saying+it+Like+Ind ians/index.html [accessed 15 February 2022].

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Howard, Jane (2014) ‘Roman Tragedies: An Almost Live Review’, The Lifted Brow, 7 March, https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/roman-traged ies-an-almost-live-review-by-jane [accessed 15 February 2022]. Howard, Jane (2018) ‘Kings of War Review—Ivo van Hove’s Stunning Shakespeare Marathon Somehow Falls Short’, The Guardian, 13 March, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/mar/13/kings-of-war-reviewivo-van-hoves-stunning-shakespeare-marathon-somehow-falls-short [accessed 15 February 2022]. Innes, Christopher (1993) Avant-Garde Theatre: 1892–1992, London: Routledge. Kattenbelt, Chiel (2008) ‘Intermediality in Theatre and Performance: Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships’, Culture, Language and Representation 6, 19–29. Kirwan, Peter (2017) ‘Second View: Roman Tragedies (Toneelgroep Amsterdam) @ The Barbican’, The Bardathon, 20 March, http://blogs. nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2017/03/20/second-view-roman-tragediestoneelgroep-amsterdam-barbican/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Knowles, Richard Paul (2002) ‘Reading Elsinore: The Ghost and the Machine’, Canadian Theatre Review 111, 87–8. Lavender, Andy (1996) ‘Curtain up on the Multi-Magic Show’, The Times, 29 October, Shakespeare Institute Newscuttings Collection. Lavender, Andy (2016) Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement, London: Routledge. LeCompte, Elizabeth, Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos, and Maria Shevtsova (2013) ‘A Conversation on The Wooster Group’s Hamlet ’, New Theatre Quarterly 29:2, 121–31. Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, London: Routledge. Linnemann, Emily (2011) ‘International Innovation? Shakespeare as Intercultural Catalyst’, Shakespeare Survey 64, 13–24. Mancewicz, Aneta (2014) Intermedial Shakespeares on European Stages, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Marcus, Raffaella and David Ralf (2017) ‘Review: Roman Tragedies at the Barbican’, Exeunt Magazine, 27 March, http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/rev iew-roman-tragedies-barbican/ [accessed 7 July 2021]. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (1998) ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (eds) Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 249–53. Maurin, Frédéric (2018) ‘Fantasy and Reality in Salome’, in Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai (eds) Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie, London: Methuen, 158–62.

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Maxwell, Dominic (2016) ‘The Tempest ’, The Times, 21 November, https:// www.thetimes.co.uk/article/theatre-the-tempest-at-the-royal-shakespeare-the atre-stratford-upon-avon-vflfwhb9k [accessed 15 February 2022]. Müller, Heiner (2000) Hamletmachine, in Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (eds) Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, London: Routledge, 211–14. OED (Oxford English Dictionary) (2020) Oxford: Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Pearson, Mike (2016) ‘National Theatre Wales’s Coriolan/us: A “Live Film”’, in Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof (eds) Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, New York: Routledge, 284–8. Prescott, Paul (2015) ‘Troilus and Cressida’, in Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott, and Erin Sullivan (eds) A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival, London: Bloomsbury, 213–17. ‘Prospero Meets Ariel’ (2017) Royal Shakespeare Company, YouTube, 24 March, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH6qvx5PSq8 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Ratcliffe, Michael (1987) ‘Machinations’, The Observer, 4 October, Shakespeare Institute Newscuttings Collection. Rogoff, Gordon (1986) ‘Hamletmachine by Heiner Müller (review)’, Performing Arts Journal 10:1, 54–7. Rokison-Woodall, Abigail (2017) Shakespeare in the Theatre: Nicholas Hytner, London: Bloomsbury. Seymour, Lee (2017) ‘The Royal Shakespeare Company Paves Way for Virtual Reality Theater’, Forbes, 10 January, https://www.forbes.com/sites/leesey mour/2017/01/10/the-royal-shakespeare-company-is-paving-the-way-forvirtual-reality-theater/?sh=4359ad4734b1 [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Shakespeare’s Sprite Takes Flight as an Intel-Crafted Digital Avatar’ (2017) Wired, 11 August, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/bc/barbican-the-tem pest-intel [accessed 15 February 2022]. Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, New York: Penguin. Sontag, Susan (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Penguin. Spencer, Charles (1996) ‘When the Machinery Stops the Show’, The Daily Telegraph, 15 August, Shakespeare Institute Newscuttings Collection. Thomas, Alun (2013) ‘Coriolan/us ’, in Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott, and Erin Sullivan (eds) A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival, London: Bloomsbury, 51–4.

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Trueman, Matt (2017) ‘Is Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies the Most Significant Piece of Theatre in Britain in a Decade?’, WhatsOnStage, 23 March, https://www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/news/roman-tragedies-ivovan-hove-barbican-significance_43186.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_med ium=social&utm_campaign=23mar2017 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Wolf, Matt (2004) ‘Measure for Measure’, Variety, 13 June, https://variety. com/2004/legit/reviews/measure-for-measure-7-1200532857/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Worthen, W. B. (2008) ‘Hamlet at Ground Zero: The Wooster Group and the Archive of Performance’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59:3, 303–22. Zinoman, Jason (2007) ‘Inspired by Ghosts of Hamlets Past’, The New York Times, 28 October, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/theater/28z ino.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Zurbrugg, Nicholas (1988) ‘Post-Modernism and the Multi-Media Sensibility: Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine and the Art of Robert Wilson’, Modern Drama 31:3, 439–53.

CHAPTER 5

Born-Digital Theatre

When Timothy Berners-Lee first conceived of the digital infrastructure that would eventually become the World Wide Web, he had information management on his mind.1 Frustrated by the disconnected way in which data was stored at CERN, the European nuclear research centre where he worked, he drafted a proposal in 1989 for ‘a universal linked information system’ that would allow colleagues to quickly access files stored in different locations through a method he called ‘distributed hypertext’ (Berners-Lee 1998). By clicking on links embedded into a ‘sheet’ of information, users could navigate their way in a ‘non-linear’ fashion, producing an experience that resembled ‘the old computer game “adventure”’ (ibid.). Berners-Lee estimated that the platform, originally named ‘mesh’, would take two programmers between six months to a year to build. CERN backed the project, and by 1991 the World Wide Web as we now know it was born. While the primary goal for the web was the networking of existing information on an unprecedented scale, it wasn’t long before the creation of new content became a further ambition. Early adopters quickly showed interest in the platform’s participatory, creative potential, setting up discussion boards and chat rooms and writing code for their own webpages. Though some creative practitioners worried that the evergrowing forms of entertainment offered by networked computing would eventually crowd out more traditional, analogue art forms, others became © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Sullivan, Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice, Shakespeare in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05763-2_5

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interested in the possibility of bringing old and new together. As early as 1991, Brenda Laurel argued for the complementary relationship between computers and theatre, suggesting that programmers could improve their digital work by thinking of it in more dramatic terms. ‘Designing human– computer experience isn’t about building a better desktop’, she wrote. ‘It’s about creating imaginary worlds that have a special relationship to reality—worlds in which we can extend, amplify, and enrich our own capacities to think, feel, and act’ (Laurel 1993: 32–3). Janet H. Murray took a similar view at the end of the decade in her playfully titled Hamlet on the Holodeck, though she aimed her advice in the opposite direction. Just as computer programmers might benefit from thinking more about theatrical world-building, dramatists could enrich their creative practice by working with, rather than pulling against, a global, non-linear, and continually expanding World Wide Web. Murray imagined that it would be a ‘cyberbard’ of the future who would realize the creative possibilities of digital storytelling, composing new work that rivalled the achievements of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2016: 262). But it is telling, if not entirely surprising, how often Shakespeare’s plays themselves would become the raw materials for such ventures. As web culture has evolved, online audiences have seen countless Hamlets, Juliets, Pucks, and Prosperos test what is possible on the ‘holodeck’s’ continually shifting stage. This chapter examines a selection of these born-digital and very often participatory performances, which include relatively straightforward readings of Shakespeare’s plays as well as highly adapted spin-offs. In doing so, it considers the different ways that collective presence has been created at a distance, and the extent to which audiences have found such forms of togetherness satisfying, both in terms of being with others and being with the artistic work. Like the previous two chapters, it begins by looking back at the longer history of its subject matter, exploring how Shakespeare enthusiasts from the seventeenth century onwards sought out opportunities to take an active part in the plays and to express something of themselves through them. It then turns to two very different forms of technology that have expanded enormously in the twenty-first century—social media and virtual reality (VR)—and examines the affordances and limitations of each for Shakespearean theatre-making. While social media feeds have the benefit of being highly accessible and richly performative spaces in many

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people’s lives, they typically lack a sense of concentrated, sustained presence. VR platforms, in contrast, offer participants a densely embodied experience of ‘being there’, but the knowledge and equipment required to create and access work in these digital spaces mean that they remain out of reach for most people, at least for the time being. Caught between overfamiliarity and diffuseness on the one hand, and powerful yet esoteric technology on the other, born-digital Shakespearean performance has in many ways been stuck in an impasse. While many of the projects discussed in this chapter did not prove successful in critical terms, they nevertheless represent important, knowledge-generating experiments in digital theatre-making. Borrowing from the language of software testing, one might think of them as ‘beta versions’ that have helped creative practitioners figure out how feelings of presence, liveness, and immersion can be created when audiences and performers never share the same physical space. The chapter concludes by considering how experiments during the COVID-19 pandemic suggested a middle way between the disjointed banality of social media and the exoticism of VR. Through the use of video-conferencing software, and in particular Zoom, practitioners demonstrated how simple technologies rooted in real-time togetherness might serve as the kind of ‘empty space’ identified by Peter Brook as so conducive to theatre-making. I argue that the most pronounced contribution of Zoom theatre to Shakespearean performance was to make it instantly more accessible and inclusive, not just among audiences but also performers who have sometimes been cut off from high-profile, globally visible theatre-making due to inequalities connected to race, class, gender, disability, and caring responsibilities. At the same time, I show how the most technically accomplished examples of Zoom performance demonstrated the potential for this everyday platform to evolve into a richly intermedial site, where audiences’ expectations about the time and space of locked-down life could be unsettled and powerfully reimagined. Such work suggests that the born-digital theatre-making of the future has the ability to be both accessible and extraordinary, inclusive and spectacular—to extend the reach of performance while simultaneously furthering its artistic and philosophical ambitions.

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5.1

Participatory Shakespeare

One of the defining features of internet culture is the possibility of participation. From sharing selfies on Instagram, to speaking one’s mind on Twitter, to taking up dance challenges on TikTok, modern digital life thrives in an ecosystem of creation and consumption. In 1999, the web designer Darcy DiNucci coined the term ‘Web 2.0’ to describe this process of collaboration and co-creation, though it wasn’t until the midnoughties that both the term and the lived reality of what it might mean began to gain widespread currency (1999: 32). As we now know, social media platforms would emerge and proliferate from that point onwards, with the membership of Facebook alone swelling to one billion active users in under a decade (Fowler 2012). But even if the twenty-first century is rightly understood as the era of the interactive ‘prosumer’, who doesn’t just consume cultural content but also produces it, it is by no means the first time that collaborative, grassroots creativity flourished (Ritzer et al. 2012). Within the narrower realm of Shakespearean performance, lovers of the plays have produced communal stagings of the drama for almost as long as it has been in existence. This section traces the early history of user-oriented participation in Shakespeare, from the private theatricals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; to the reading clubs, amateur dramatic societies, and board games of the nineteenth; to the experimental videogames and virtual worlds of the twentieth and early twenty-first. Across this broad historical sweep, I identify an enduring desire to participate collectively in the performance of Shakespeare and to celebrate the kinds of community and self-expression it enables. In his study of Shakespeare and amateur performance, Michael Dobson has highlighted the centuries-long tradition of everyday prosuming that underpins today’s digital interactivity: Just as the emergence of the World Wide Web has enabled the revolutionary nineteenth-century technology of the telegraph to be retrospectively understood as the ‘Victorian internet’, so perhaps in the era of YouTube it may be possible for us to revalue and re-examine the long history of amateur Shakespeare as an important theatrical instance of user-created content. (Dobson 2011: 17)

Dobson shows how the non-professional staging of Shakespeare’s plays dates to at least as early as 1623, when the playwright’s (almost) complete

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works first appeared in print. In February of that year, Sir Edward Dering, first baronet of Surrenden Dering in Kent, paid 4 shillings to a scribe to copy out his adaptation of both parts of Henry IV , plus another 17 shillings for an assortment of wigs and false beards to help him stage it (ibid.: 27–8). Dering was an avid collector of plays and organized amateur performances of them in his home, with family members, neighbours, and even servants filling out the cast (Holland 2007: 26). Henry IV , however, was his first known attempt at adapting Shakespeare’s plays, and the work he carried out sheds light on his personal interests and perhaps his professional ambitions too. With Falstaff’s role significantly cut and domestic elements similarly downplayed, what was left was ‘a political drama of rule and rebellion’ (ibid.: 28). Dobson suggests that this ‘highly actable script’ would have suited an ‘aspiring courtier’ eager to showcase his talents as a political thinker and public orator, while simultaneously demonstrating a commitment to the kind of theatrical patronage popular among the elite (2011: 27–8). For Dering and for many others who followed, participating in Shakespearean performance was a powerful way of performing oneself. More private stagings of Shakespeare appeared throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often in ways that continued to generate social clout for the aristocratic households that hosted them. During this time, such performances remained a mostly upper-class affair, with benefactors using them to lay bare, ‘within a closed community’, ‘the synergy … between the personal identities of the players and those of the characters they represented’ (ibid.: 26). It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that more populist forms of participation in Shakespeare began to emerge, whether in the shape of amateur dramatic societies, working men’s evening classes, or women’s reading clubs. Andrew Murphy has shown how in England and Wales the growing interest in Shakespeare at this time was a direct result of the expansion of public education and the rise of cheap print. He identifies around one hundred autobiographies written by working-class men and (to a lesser extent) women that document lively, ‘user-generated’ engagement with Shakespeare, from the recitation of speeches to trips to the theatre to the creation of groups like the ‘Shakespeare Mutual Improvement Society’ (Murphy 2008: 111). Popular enthusiasm for Shakespeare was such that by 1864, the tercentenary of the playwright’s birth, he was touted in Stratford-upon-Avon as ‘the POET of the PEOPLE’ and, in London, a ceremony honouring him attracted a crowd of 100,000 (ibid.: 1).

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This more popular Shakespeare was also a more civically engaged and overtly political one, offering participants new forms of influence in their wider communities. As private gatherings evolved into more public displays of devotion, Shakespeare became ‘a common cultural property’ that lent prestige and credibility to those who studied and performed him (ibid.: 157). Katherine West Scheil has shown how such engagement was also present on the other side of Atlantic, where more than five hundred women’s Shakespeare societies took shape in the late nineteenth century (2012: 1). Whereas all-male Shakespeare clubs in the US were largely an elite enterprise, restricted to just a few groups located mostly in New England, women’s clubs could be found across the country and encompassed a more diverse membership in terms of both class and race. Many of these groups involved regular opportunities to read the plays aloud and to discuss characters, themes, and matters of elocution and pronunciation; in some cases, activities also extended to the wider community, with essay prizes and library bequests presented in Shakespeare’s honour. Through such endeavours, Scheil argues, women were able ‘to move beyond the parlor, both physically and metaphorically, and to participate in vigorous programs of public service and civic life’ (ibid.: 8). Participating in Shakespeare generated new opportunities for social inclusion and political engagement, a phenomenon that would continue in the years to come. As more people began engaging in the study and performance of Shakespeare’s works, as well as the forms of public life that they facilitated, new approaches to ‘playing’ these texts also emerged. The mid-tolate nineteenth century saw the rise of Shakespeare-themed board and card games—predecessors to digital videogames—which ranged from familiar entertainments ornamented with quotations to pastimes based on the language, characters, and themes of the plays themselves. As with many games created at this time, ‘self-improvement was key to playing’, with participants both absorbing and proudly exhibiting knowledge of Shakespeare as they competed (Ray 2011: 9). This expertise was often incidental to the actual gameplay. A commemorative checkerboard produced for the 1864 tercentenary, for instance, included Shakespearean quotations on each of its red squares and a timeline of the plays along its sides, but playing the game did not actually involve direct engagement with these ‘sentiments of wit and wisdom’ (‘Shakspere’s Sentiments’ c.1864).

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In other cases, Shakespeare and his plays were indeed the game. In ‘The Shakspere Oracle’, for example, players would take a circular card featuring a number of personal questions, such as ‘What is my pet weakness?’ or what are ‘His personal charms[?]’ (‘Shakspere Oracle’ 1892). Each question matched with a number, which in turn produced a quotation from Shakespeare that answered the query (Fig. 5.1). Those asking for a ‘Glimpse of the future’, for example, might be met with the somewhat underwhelming news from Hamlet that ‘we are not over happy: on fortune’s cap we are not the very button’, or the jollier prediction from The Taming of the Shrew that ‘We will have rings and things and fine array’ (ibid.). Such entertainments allowed players to take Shakespeare back into the parlour, and to use him as an excuse for socializing in mixed company and revealing titbits of information—often flirtatious—about oneself. The emergence of such games signalled a new era in participatory Shakespeare, in which ‘actors’ did not just play the drama but rather played with it. Gina Bloom has shown how this distinction is not as secure as it might at first seem: ‘Theatre is a good model for games’, she argues, ‘because it is one of the earliest media technologies for interactive play’ (2018: 2). In other words, theatre itself is essentially a game, inviting players to take parts, to compete in a playful or ‘ludic’ matter, and hopefully to have fun in the process. And yet, game versions of Shakespeare offer a mode of participating in the drama that is somewhat different to more traditional performance. Rather than projecting oneself into a character and play, however fully or incompletely, it is the drama that is transported to one’s own personal and social sphere, becoming a vehicle for the performance of self. Again, the difference is not absolute: Dobson highlights how the history of Shakespeare and amateur performance is often a history of showing off oneself. Still, the fact that Shakespeare games unfolded on the stage of the real world, in which the pretence of fiction no longer cocooned the acting on display, necessarily altered what was at stake in these encounters with the playwright and his works. Although the twentieth century heralded a Shakespeare who was less populist and more sacred, as Lawrence W. Levine has influentially argued, it nevertheless saw a Shakespeare frequently invoked in the launch of new media—and particularly those of mass communication (1988: 80– 1). Jonathan Sterne has attributed this phenomenon to ‘the ubiquity and imagined stabilities’ of the Shakespearean corpus, which confers prestige, gravitas, and humanist principles to emerging platforms all at once (2016:

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Fig. 5.1 Playing cards from ‘The Shakspere Oracle’ party game [1892, ART flat c25] (Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License)

322). ‘[P]eople perform media by performing Shakespeare’, he writes, and over the years such shows have included demonstrations of an early telephone transmission, a graphophone recording, and an instant message posted online (ibid.). In all three cases, developers used lines from Hamlet to illustrate the capabilities of their inventions as they showcased them for the public. In the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this affinity for Shakespeare also surfaced in videogames, arguably the most significant art form to emerge in the last fifty years. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, Shakespeare-themed videogames invited players to engage with

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Shakespeare’s works in a wide variety of ways, ranging from incidental, to decorative, to educational, to ennobling (Bloom 2015; Osborne 2010). Unlike their earlier counterparts, however, many videogames were designed as single-player, solitary pursuits, a quality that often meant that they bore more resemblance to a novel or film than a play. The rise of online gaming in the 1990s began to change this by connecting players from different households together through the internet, and the subsequent emergence of ‘massively multiplayer online role-playing games’—better known as MMORPGs—transformed the social possibilities of videogames further. Digital games were now a form of ‘social media’, Jeffery Wimmer has argued, ‘creating new socio-culturally and politically relevant spaces for interaction’—including interaction with Shakespeare (2014: 111). In 2007, two new virtual enterprises invited members to play Shakespeare in this participatory, social way. The first was Arden, an MMORPG set in the Elizabethan town of Ilminster and populated by Shakespearean characters. Explorers in Arden might strike up a conversation with Falstaff about Mistress Quickly, learn from Perdita about farming, or embark on a quest based on Richard III (Makarov 2016: 11; Losh 2008: 12–13). The idea, according to the game’s founder Edward Castronova, was that different plays could form the basis of future versions: ‘The way we envision it is … students [will] come in and say, “OK, what play are we doing this year?” And we’ll say, “Well, let’s do a post-apocalyptic Macbeth”’ (Arthur 2007). The project had obvious potential for teaching Shakespeare in literature and drama classrooms, but it was the study of social economics that most interested Castronova, a scholar of media studies and virtual economies. With a $250,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation to research economic behaviour in the world of videogames, Castronova decided to use Shakespeare as a ‘smokescreen’ that would at once deflect attention away from his primary ‘experiment’ and lend his project cultural clout (Makarov 2016: 11). ‘There was no guarantee that people would take a world of dragons and elves seriously’, he commented in an interview, ‘But no one at a university would question Shakespeare’ (Baker 2008). In the end, however, the problem with Arden was not that people didn’t take it seriously, but rather that they didn’t show up. An overreliance on text, confusion about the way the virtual world functioned, and a lack of action meant that, irrespective of whether the project worked as an adaptation of Shakespeare, it failed to work as a game. Without a critical mass of players,

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the possibility of meaningful, social performance—whether Shakespearean or economic—was never fully realized. Somewhat more successful were the online performances of Shakespeare that emerged more organically around the same time in Second Life, a virtual world created by Linden Lab in 2003. Like the social media platforms that would soon follow, Second Life invited users to create free accounts and interact with one another in a digital environment. Although it did not present its members with a central conflict or quest—and in that sense was not strictly a game—it did invite participants to immerse themselves, through their digital avatars, in a three-dimensional, pervasive environment where new identities could be explored and alternative lives pursued. Among the many opportunities available was the chance to perform Shakespeare in no fewer than ‘five virtual Globe theaters’, one of which hosted the Second Life Shakespeare Company (SLSC) (Rowe 2010: 59). Launched in 2007, the SLSC aimed to make ‘live Shakespearean theatre available to anyone anywhere with a computer’, and over the course of 2008–9 its offerings included scenes from Hamlet and Twelfth Night (Greatley-Hirsch and Best 2017: 454). For Peter Holland, the most intriguing aspect of the SLSC’s work was its approach to casting, which involved audience members from previous weeks putting themselves forward for upcoming roles. ‘Playgoers become performers’, he wrote, ‘and community of participation in the performance is redefined’ (Holland 2009: 255). Though the company did not last very long, due to funding and internal disagreements—a perennial theme in the history of amateur theatre—it established a model by which ‘residents of a diverse, unbounded geosphere’ could come together both to watch and create Shakespearean performance (Greatley-Hirsch and Best 2017: 454–5). What had long been a localized pastime was finding a place on a globalized stage. Second Life still exists, and in fact experienced a boost during the COVID-19 lockdowns, but the bubble of its ever-growing expectations burst around the same time as the SLSC. In 2009, its membership began to plateau, a large portion of Linden Lab’s staff was laid off, and news headlines started asking, ‘What happened to Second Life?’ (Hansen 2009). Perhaps the biggest thing that ‘happened’ to it—and to global culture in general—was the extraordinary rise in less immersive, but more ubiquitous, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which were coming into their own with the rise of the smartphone in

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the late 2000s. In these digital environments, users were not invited to take on an entirely new identity but rather to play themselves, usually for people they already knew, in a way that extended their ‘first’ lives into the online realm. Performance would still feature prominently, but the game was now the fashioning of one’s own self, typically de-anonymized, rather than the creation of a separate and fictional persona. Such a development marked a significant shift away from the alternative role-playing invited by Second Life and MMORPGs, as well as the longer history of amateur performance, but it did not constitute a complete break. As Dobson has suggested, offline, community-based theatremaking has long been about ‘supplying a masquerade which displays rather than disguises the identity and status of the performer’, drawing attention to their most socially desirable attributes in the process (2011: 64). Such dynamics were certainly present in the playing of nineteenthcentury party games like ‘The Shakespeare Oracle’, and perhaps also in some of the working men’s clubs and women’s reading groups established around the same time. But it is also clear that many of these forums for participating in Shakespeare were equally invested in fostering a sense of community and the kinds of social belonging that come with it. Whether in the country home, the civic sphere, or the rapidly evolving World Wide Web, for centuries people have come together to perform Shakespeare and themselves side by side. Like the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they have done so ‘most obscenely and courageously’, producing something that can bring with it friendship, prestige, entertainment, and even the possibility of self-fulfilment (1.2.100–1).

5.2

Performance 2.0

There is little question that the rise of social media has radically reshaped life around the world, including the experience of theatre. As I have argued throughout this book, theatre and digital technology are regularly placed in opposition to one another, and yet they frequently intertwine in both practical and theoretical ways. In her account of seeing King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 2011, Sarah Bay-Cheng has drawn attention to the amount of digital material an audience member encounters even when attending a fairly traditional, low-tech production. From learning about the show through BAM’s electronic newsletter and social media channels, to reading reviews and looking at photographs

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online, to sharing her own thoughts on Twitter and her blog, Bay-Cheng recounts how her experience of this production was far from ‘a singular event’ that ‘appear[ed] and disappear[ed]’ in the course of an evening (2012: 33–4). Rather, it was one that ‘circulated through and emerged from mediated networks’, suggesting that ‘performance’ is not so much a one-off, in-person occurrence as it is a fluid ‘mode’ in which a range of encounters, both fleshy and virtual, produce meaning for their audiences (ibid.: 34–5). Bay-Cheng’s characterization of performance as a ‘mode’, rather than a specific medium or event, resonates with sociological analyses of Web 2.0 culture and the kinds of ‘theatre’ it can produce. Since the early days of social media, digital theorists have pointed out how intrinsic the idea of theatrical performance is to the way these platforms work. If all forms of identity are performed, as the sociologist Erving Goffman argued so influentially in the mid-twentieth century, then the presentation of oneself online is certainly no exception (1959). What’s more, the opportunities for controlling and artfully curating the kinds of personal information transmitted through social media can intensify the deliberateness of this kind of performance. According to Erika Pearson, such platforms provide areas which are disembodied, mediated and controllable, and through which alternate performances can be displayed to others … Users manipulate these communicative codes, with varying degrees of skill and dexterity, to create not only online selves, but also to create the staging and setting in which these selves exist. (2009)

The level of practice and care that goes into such online performances of self has led Patrick Lonergan to suggest that they bear more than passing resemblance to Richard Schechner’s concept of theatre as ‘twice-behaved behaviour’, or the thing that ‘never [happens] for the first time’ (2016: 28). Art is present on both the theatrical and the social media stage, shaping what’s on show. Such qualities have made social media platforms attractive, if challenging, spaces for the creation of born-digital theatrical work, especially when combined with their seeming potential to reach younger audiences—a constant ambition among arts organizations. The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) established itself as an innovator in this area in the early 2010s when it produced two full-scale social media adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays: Such Tweet Sorrow (2010), which reimagined Romeo

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and Juliet as a five-week-long teen saga on Twitter, and Midsummer Night’s Dreaming (2013), a world-building project that mixed three days of in-person performances with a sprawling digital universe on Google+. Though both projects are now very dated in terms of the lifecycle of social media—Google+ has not even existed since 2019—they remain, for the time being at least, two of the most comprehensive, ambitious, and public attempts to stage Shakespeare on such platforms (Sullivan 2018). This section considers these two projects in detail, exploring how social media-based theatre can create opportunities for character-building and audience participation while also generating difficulties concerning the ethical responsibilities of performance as its fourth wall recedes. As will become clear, these projects were not successful in the most obvious sense of the word: many audience members struggled to follow them, one ventured into territory that most people would consider unacceptable, and the match between Shakespearean and social media forms struck many people as uncomfortable. And yet, both projects generated useful insights into the nature of social media platforms and the kind of performance they do and do not support. The fact that similarly ambitious, high-profile, full-length social media productions have not followed in greater numbers reflects the challenges of using these inherently diffuse platforms to stage the kinds of concentrated, attention-demanding experiences typically associated with theatre. Although Such Tweet Sorrow and Midsummer Night’s Dreaming differed from one another in significant ways, both utilized the profilebased structure of their chosen social media platforms to place special emphasis on the performance of character and identity. In Such Tweet, directed by Roxana Silbert and co-produced by the digital innovation company Mudlark, each member of the seven-person cast had their own Twitter feed, which they used to tweet their modernized and mostly improvised lines. In Dreaming, co-created by Gregory Doran, Sarah Ellis, and Tea Uglow, the twenty-plus original characters that populated the magical forest had their own Google+ pages, full of personalized content. While both projects had separate webpages that aggregated the material posted by all of their cast members—resulting in more or less linear, communal timelines—audience members were also encouraged to use their own Twitter and Google+ accounts to follow characters directly and receive updates from them in their social media feeds (Fig. 5.2).2 Such a format blurred the division between fictional and real life, inviting audiences to engage with the productions’ characters in ways

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Fig. 5.2 The digital stage for Such Tweet Sorrow (2010), directed by Roxana Silbert for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Mudlark (Screenshot)

that mirrored how they would interact with their own followers online. This included scrutinizing characters’ profiles for information about what they liked, how they interacted with others, and what kinds of material they chose to share. Juliet (@julietcap16, played by Charlotte Wakefield), for instance, was a sixteen-year-old girl who followed pop musicians like Justin Timberlake and had a passion for the Twilight vampire trilogy, while Romeo (@romeo_mo, played by James Barrett) was an Xboxaddicted teenager who traded lewd quips with his badly behaved best friend, Mercutio (@mercuteio, played by Ben Ashton). Dreaming took such character development further, presenting its audiences with around 3,000 pieces of original content that brought to life new characters, including Bottom’s overbearing mum, who doled out acting advice to her

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followers; Snug the joiner’s wife, who was busy sewing her husband’s lion costume and sharing knitting patterns; and The Knight’s Herald newspaper, which posted tabloid-style headlines about A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s more salacious proceedings (Moffat 2013). Such activity created a bustling, familiar world of online sharing that at once encouraged audience participation in this experimental mode of theatre-making and stimulated deeper reflection about the construction of identity on social media. In terms of the first objective, both projects certainly succeeded. Maurizio Calbi has explored how Such Tweet both cultivated and thematized interactivity, ‘the conditio sine qua non for the performance to become a “trending event”’ (2013: 140). Audiences following the project quickly and enthusiastically joined in, tweeting thousands of messages using the production’s official hashtag, #suchtweet, and also generating their own calling card, #teamchorus. Their posts ranged from interactions with the production’s characters, to commentary on its storyline, to conversations with one another, to a collective #savemercutio campaign, in which they petitioned for a happier ending for Romeo’s best friend. A remarkable performance of audience emerged alongside this unusual performance of Shakespeare, and through it a clear camaraderie developed among many of the show’s most ardent followers. ‘It feels so weird… It’s close to heartbroken… We’re #suchtweet’s orphans’, one bereft fan posted the day after the production ended, while another consoled herself by highlighting the lasting relationships that had been forged: ‘Adjusting to the new longterm shape of my Twitter feed: without #suchtweet but with lots of new friends’.3 Three years later, the producers of Dreaming built on Such Tweet ’s achievements by making audience participation and community-building their starting point. Using the official hashtag #Dream40, chosen in honour of the fact that this was the RSC’s fortieth production of the play, the theatre encouraged its sizeable Google+ following to post Dreamrelated memes, quotes, and music suggestions to their profiles over the course of nearly three weeks. This digital pre-show built up to the main event: an in-person production of Shakespeare’s Dream that took place in Stratford-upon-Avon over the midsummer weekend and mimicked the real-time world of the play. On Friday evening the cast presented Act One to members of the RSC’s staff, while the woodland antics of Acts Two, Three, and Four took place in the middle of Saturday night in front of a small, public audience in the company’s historic Ashcroft Room. On

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Sunday afternoon, the RSC invited more members of the public to participate in wedding-themed arts and crafts outside as everyone prepared for the royal nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta, and finally that evening the actors performed Act Five outdoors for an open audience. All the while, digital material continued to be posted on Google+ by both the creative team and audience members, some of whom were there in person but most of whom were not (Fig. 5.3). The thinking behind such a sprawling, hybrid approach was that it would at once mix in-person and online modes of performance and participation, thereby challenging long-standing binaries within the theatre, while also evoking the everyday interplay of physical and digital experience in modern life. Reflecting on the inspiration behind the project, Google’s Uglow wrote about how life in the twenty-first century ‘is fragmented, glimpsed, experienced and amplified through [social media] sharing … big news events—riots, bombings, royal weddings—all become subject to this anarchic, multi-dimensional, multi-authored storytelling’ (2013a). In Dreaming, such polyphonic authorship not only involved new characters commenting on the events of Shakespeare’s comedy, but also included the performance of these characters’ own, parallel storylines. There were fairies taking part in flying school, a pair of opinionated beagles debating politics, Ophelia (Lysander’s younger sister) plotting her escape from a

Fig. 5.3 The digital stage for Midsummer Night’s Dreaming (2013), co-created by Gregory Doran, Sarah Ellis, and Tea Uglow for the Royal Shakespeare Company in collaboration with Google+ (Screenshot)

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nunnery, and a dancing bear that metamorphosed into a human by the time the weekend was through. Such copious and unexpected stories led Pascale Aebischer to suggest that the project’s ‘most engaged spectators are those who pay little attention to the RSC’s live performance and who enter the production’s digital environment as Puck-like auditor-actors on a dérive’ (2016: 102). Playful, non-linear storytelling abounded in this project that both celebrated and destabilized its central, Shakespearean text. The difficulty, however, lay in bringing these new voices and stories back together into a singular, coherent artistic experience. As the project got going, the volume of content meant that many of the audience’s attempts at interaction with the online characters went unacknowledged. Meanwhile, the on-site production in Stratford started to take on its own, separate identity, functioning more like a series of intimate, site-specific chamber performances than the linchpin in a spiralling digital experiment. Though an implicit aim was to fuse the on-site and the online in a way that illustrated the fallacy of ‘digital dualism’, as discussed in Chapter 2, at times Dreaming inadvertently reiterated it. ‘[I]t’s a real shame there wasn’t more effort to bring together the live and digital audiences’, Peter Kirwan commented in his review of the project, while The Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish complained that the amount and nature of the online content left him and other remote spectators ‘wondering what the Puck was going on’ (Kirwan 2013; Cavendish 2013). In Such Tweet Sorrow, the smaller cast of characters and entirely online format meant that the project was easier to follow and its deconstruction of digital dualism more persuasive. One of the features that many followers appreciated was the way the production travelled across platforms and, in doing so, blurred the division between fictional and real life. Such Tweet’s Wikipedia page, likely written by its fans, compares it to Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and notes that ‘[t]he variety of the media usage made it easier for the followers to connect to the characters … [It gave] the impression they’re following somebody’s real-life story’ (‘Such Tweet ’ 2021). Juliet appeared in YouTube videos that some viewers, unaware of the Such Tweet production, took as genuine, while Romeo invited audience members to play Call of Duty by searching for his Xbox gamertag ‘ObeRomeoKenobi’. According to Calbi, ‘hypermediacy’ became ‘immediacy’ for performers and audiences as they tested the kinds of connection the participatory medium enabled (2013: 145).

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Alongside such social interactions, Such Tweet also included topical references to a UK general election, major flight disruptions caused by a volcanic eruption in Iceland, and several football matches taking place during the production’s run. It constantly strove to be in the moment, allowing actors to improvise their lines in a way that embedded their characters’ experiences into the real and shared world of popular culture. As the actors in the production became more life-like and the fictional frame around their performance less visible, however, their sometimesrowdy interaction with audience members drew attention to the ethical risks involved in such performance. Mercutio was at the centre of much of this activity, flirting with female audience members and asking if they ‘wanted to hook up some time’, while also commenting graphically about his off-stage sexual exploits. This was nowhere more evident than in his and Romeo’s interactive game, #uploadthatload, in which they challenged one another and their followers to snap pictures of women’s cleavage without their knowledge. In this pre-#MeToo Twitter space, Romeo and Mercutio posted several pictures themselves, spurring each other on in the process: ‘@mercuteio right I know what will get you in the mood to party. A game of #uploadthatload?’. While the women in the photos that they shared were presumably in on the fictionalized context, the fact that they encouraged audience members to participate pushed the make-believe world of Such Tweet into the very real realm of online bullying and sexual harassment. The more life-like the production became, the more it moved away from the suspended ethics of fictional art and towards the codes of conduct expected, if not always realized, in the shared public sphere. Such moments of tension suggest that the more digital performance moves towards unframed verisimilitude— or what John Muse has called ‘virtual realism’—the more it may become bound by the forms of social governance people insist on elsewhere in their lives (2012: 58). Ethics are not the only matters that need increased attention as theatre simultaneously goes digital and goes public: audience behaviour, and more specifically audience creativity, also takes on new and at times challenging agency. In Such Tweet, the most involved audience members tried at different points in the drama to influence its narrative trajectory. In the early days of the project, a profile by the name of @BenVoli0 began interacting with characters and audience members, feeding them bits of plot and anticipating the story. Two weeks before Juliet and Romeo actually

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met, ‘Ben’ tweeted to Juliet, ‘hey babe my cuz is totally up to hang with u. Wanna team up with @mercuteio and Ben for some pre-party action?’. As it turned out, Ben was not part of the official cast but rather an audience member who wanted to contribute to the fun. A few days and several tweets later, Such Tweet ’s producers addressed this unexpected presence by disavowing it. To several confused followers, they wrote, ‘BenVolio is not part of #suchtweet – except as an extreme fanboy who knows less than he pretends – thought you’d like to know’. While the project encouraged participation from its audience, the active, often anarchic quality of web culture quickly tested how far such interaction could be pushed. In the end, Such Tweet preserved a more traditional line between performers and spectators, leaving @BenVoli0 to improvise his lines solo on the vast and at times lonely expanse of the internet’s digital stage. The issue of how far the audience can go—and the extent to which ‘The story shall be changed’—is perhaps the most interesting and pressing question in terms of where interactive, digital performances of Shakespeare might head next (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.230). Although there have been a few high-profile, professional attempts to stage Shakespeare with social media since Dreaming —in 2016, for instance, the British Council Europe presented A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet , and Romeo and Juliet on Instagram—the fact that the RSC and similar institutions have refrained from pursuing more social media projects reflects the inherent difficulties of creating theatre on and for these platforms (British Council 2015). Such challenges include the unpredictable interaction and limit-testing by audience members discussed above, though in the next section I will show how the appeal of such qualities has fuelled theatrical experimentation with other forms of technology. More prohibitive, I suggest, is the fundamentally diffuse nature of most social media platforms and the mundane ways in which people tend to use them. While the accessibility and familiarity of these platforms can be beneficial in terms of reaching large audiences and allowing them to fold theatrical experience into the rhythms of their daily lives, their sprawling format and the way that users dip in and out of them makes it difficult to present a concentrated, continuous, collective theatrical experience through such channels. Perhaps this is why, in recent years, theatres like the RSC have eschewed social media when it comes to large-scale projects and have instead embraced the more short-form, incidental kinds of performance and interaction that it can facilitate. Much of this work returns us to

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marketing and PR, though in a more creative fashion than the electronic newsletters referenced by Bay-Cheng at the start of this section might suggest. Advertising is an art form in its own right, and the people involved in managing the social media accounts of theatres are increasingly skilled in the kinds of performance they can facilitate. In 2016, when the RSC collaborated with Intel to produce a high-tech version of The Tempest , discussed in Chapter 4, their promotional campaign included the creation of a Snapchat filter that allowed users to take on Ariel’s magical appearance as they interacted with their friends on the platform. Such a venture enabled ‘savvy millennials’ to ‘see some of the [production’s] spectacle first-hand’, while also extending its performance into their own digital lives (Conley 2017). Three years later, The Bridge Theatre in London likewise involved audiences in the online promotion and performance of its promenade A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Throughout the show’s run, the theatre’s social media feeds were alight with GIFs and short videos of spectacular scenes from this sensory-rich, colourful production. Many were created by audience members themselves, presumably from surreptitious video taken during the production’s more boisterous, interactive moments. While theatres have traditionally prohibited recording of any kind during performances, the festive, permissive nature of this Dream cultivated a more relaxed and reflexive relationship between the communal, in-person experience of the production and the more individualized, online celebration of it. Indeed, The Bridge’s foyer featured a Dream-themed, Instagram-friendly wall that audiences could pose in front of for pictures, which they were then encouraged to post to their own social media feeds using the hashtag #BridgeDream. Such a marketing strategy blended the performance of Shakespeare with spectators’ own performances of self. In doing so, the promotional team at The Bridge not only capitalized on the free advertising that people participate in every day through the celebration of the places, products, and experiences that they like most, but also generated a lively, interactive, social media-based performance of Shakespeare in its own right. Perhaps one insight that arises from such efforts, when considered alongside the earlier, full-scale adaptations produced by the RSC, is that social media performance appears to work best when it caters to short bursts of interactivity focused more on the sharing of joyful presence than the delivery of long-form narrative content. While Such Tweet and

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Dreaming ’s most committed fans did invest the time needed to follow the projects’ dramatic twists and turns, many more engaged with them briefly and intermittently, including the theatre critic Andrew Dickson, who tweeted of Dreaming, ‘Dipped in but didn’t stay’ (@andydickson 2013). More sporadic, ancillary, and audience-driven social media activity, such as The Bridge’s Dream campaign, works with the fleeting and diffuse forms of attention that people typically pay to social media, rather than attempting to coax their engagement into something more focused and sustained. What all this appears to suggest is that social media is not especially good at facilitating narrative-driven theatre, even as it excels as a platform for multisensory performance. Rather, it is a postdramatic medium par excellence, defying coherent, linear progression in favour of sensory-rich, affect-laden celebrations of individual and shared presence.

5.3

Real Bodies, Virtual Worlds

The diffuseness of social media, and the difficulties it poses for long-form, concentrated storytelling, have caused some critics to suggest that wholly digital platforms are simply not suitable for theatre-making. Reflecting on Midsummer Night’s Dreaming, John Wyver lamented the lack of physical, sensory presence that he felt when participating in entirely online theatre projects. Though he had once championed these born-digital experiments, he felt a growing ‘disillusion’ with what they could accomplish as compared to more traditional, embodied theatre, be it experienced in person or through skilful recording: [T]here probably wasn’t a single epiphanic moment, but I started to lose interest in all of the digital stuff. Compared with filming Shakespeare’s play[s], it began to feel – well, the only word that seemed right then, and seems right now, was and is ‘thin’. Compared with the smells and the textures and the sounds and the thingness-es of the studio, the digital world was pale and distant. Drama in the real world came to seem seductive in a way that appeared beyond drama in a digital space. (Wyver 2013)

Wyver was not alone in feeling underwhelmed by the digital and in awe of the physical in the wake of Dreaming. In her own reflection on the project, Google’s Uglow likewise emphasized the deep, engrossing power of live, embodied performance, which she characterized as ‘amazing’, ‘intimidating’, and ‘literally magical’ (2013b). ‘It is almost impossible to

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translate the play into a similar digital parallel’, she wrote, implying that when it comes to in-person and online approaches to theatre-making, the millennia-old technology of the living human body will always win (ibid.). Elsewhere, however, she made a related remark that hinted at another possibility when it came to creating performance digitally: ‘I personally realised that physical theatre is magical, transformative. It is a form of virtual reality’ (Uglow 2013c). While Uglow’s intention was to emphasize the unique power of inperson, low-tech theatre, her observation can also be read in the other direction: just as theatre is a form of virtual reality, virtual reality is a form of theatre. As discussed in Chapter 1, VR technologies, which use ‘computer-aided stimuli [to] create the immersive illusion of being somewhere else’, invite their users to step outside of their immediate environment, usually by putting on some form of headset, and project themselves mentally, emotionally, and physically into imagined worlds (Rubin and Grey 2020). Such qualities have led commentators to describe VR as ‘an ultimately theatrical medium’, where the artistic principles of ‘mimesis’, ‘participation’, and above all ‘immersion’ fundamentally shape the creative design (Dixon 2006: 23–4; Rheingold 1991: 34; Reaney 1999: 183). The particular emphasis on immersion within VR, both in terms of mental absorption and embodied experience, at once distinguishes it from the dispersed and sporadic nature of social media, as explored in the previous section, and connects it to the kind of immersive, in-person theatre-making that I discussed at the start of this book. Though VR experiences are typically far shorter than a production like Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, the two share an interest in locating audiences in imagined worlds and inviting them to interact directly and physically with their surroundings. According to Rebecca W. Bushnell and Michael Ullyot, a VR production may appear more like film in its reliance on recording and projecting image and sound … [but it] is in fact more like immersive theater, insofar as it is unbound by a single frame or single point of view, and as it summons up an illusion of a space that the spectator inhabits beyond the ‘real world’. (forthcoming)

The problem, of course, is in the material and technical construction of such life-like worlds, which have long been the stuff of fantasies but have

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very rarely come to fruition. As I noted earlier in this chapter, attempts in the early 2000s at creating digital environments in which Shakespeare’s works might be interactively ‘played’ fell far short of their founders’ visions, and that was before the involvement of the physical body became a further goal. Given Sleep No More’s extraordinary success in the realm of in-person, immersive art, it is fitting that this production eventually became a testing ground for virtual forms of immersion. In 2012, Punchdrunk collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab to explore the possibility of creating ‘an online interactive experience’ that ‘matche[d] the quality of the physical and visceral, live experience’ that so vividly animated the original production (Dixon et al. 2012: 4). With funding from the UK’s Digital Research & Development Fund for Arts and Culture—supported in part by Nesta, the same organization that had backed NT Live—Punchdrunk practitioners and MIT technologists designed a hybrid Sleep No More experience that paired on-site audience members with online counterparts. Through a series of digitally enabled ‘portals’, including a ghostly typewriter and a Ouija board that appeared to move on their own, on-site and online participants could communicate with one another and undertake a shared quest (ibid.: 11). Though large in ambition, this pilot project was limited in terms of its duration and reach: it ran for just a week and involved fourteen digital audience members (ibid.: 4, 11). These participants experienced Sleep No More through a largely text-based computer display: ‘The background was mostly black’, recalled Rose May Biggin, with ‘new rooms and places … described with a few select details … [that were] written in white across the screen’ (2014: 173). An ominous soundtrack played throughout, while flashes of ‘evocative, but largely non-figurative imagery’ occasionally appeared ‘in the background’ (Dixon et al. 2012: 10). In their final report on the project, Dan Dixon, Jon Rogers, and Paul Eggleston noted the difficulties involved in mounting such an ambitious endeavour with limited time and money. Technical problems arose, both in-person and online participants found themselves confused about what they were supposed to be doing, and the thrill of immersive presence proved difficult to create for those watching from home. Most challenging of all was the way the online setting cued expectations that the experience would function like a videogame that could be won or lost. ‘People are not by default playful when they encounter a computer screen’, the report’s authors explained; ‘they are instrumental and goal oriented’ (ibid.: 36).

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But despite such difficulties—and, in some cases, because of them—the project yielded valuable insights into how feelings of immersion might be deepened in the future. One of the most unexpected results of the Punchdrunk/MIT experiment was the close relationship forged between online audience members and the technical operators who responded to their questions in real time. Although the primary role of these technicians was to bridge a number of functional gaps in the largely automated digital system, which ‘was not sophisticated enough’ to cope with entirely openended input from online participants, once the experiment began their involvement quickly grew into something ‘more important and poignant’ (ibid.: 32). The operators were the humans with whom online participants had the greatest potential for contact, and their constant presence proved the most interesting feature for them. ‘80 per cent of my enjoyment was uncovering the person that I was interacting with’, one digital audience member commented, while the operators themselves stressed the bonds they developed with those whom they guided. As one noted, ‘there’s an intimacy that comes from telling someone a story for three hours’ (ibid.). In their report, Dixon, Rogers, and Eggleston finished by emphasizing the unrivalled ‘role of real, living, breathing humans in a digital performance’, even when the input of those humans is meant to be ‘facilitative rather than performative’ (ibid.: 37). Accordingly, they recommended that live, human performers be favoured above artificial intelligence (i.e. pre-programmed characters) in digital theatre projects and that everyone involved the live delivery of a show be viewed as an actor, since that is how the audience would experience them. Another recommendation in the report was to find ways of disrupting the overfamiliarity and banality of the computer screen and separating online spectators more radically from their normal, everyday lives. In the live, in-person experience of Sleep No More, they explained, audience members go through a ‘ritual process’ of entering the physical space and having their mood and mind-set gradually attuned to the performance they are about to witness (ibid.: 18). ‘The online experience’, in contrast, ‘had a decided lack’ of such atmospheric ritual: it ‘was contained within a browser, on a laptop, usually it seemed in [participants’] homes. None of this created a space removed from the everyday’ (ibid.: 21). This screen-based version of Sleep No More was not separate, bounded, and enveloping enough to pull spectators out of their normal lives and the feelings of work that came with staring at a computer screen. In order to

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create a more playful, open mood, digital theatre-makers needed to find a way to ‘separat[e] people from their real life experience and mov[e] them into another world’ (ibid.: 36). One way of doing this was to leave the two-dimensional screen behind and explore the in-the-round possibilities of more physically immersive forms of VR. This was something that the Punchdrunk/MIT team initially considered, before ‘abandon[ing]’ it due to time and money constraints (ibid.: 10). Six years later, the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company in Boston took up the challenge, working with Google to develop an hour-long, 360-degree film of Hamlet entitled Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit (also discussed in Chapter 1). Directed by Steven Maler, and featuring actors with both stage and screen experience, this condensed version of Hamlet differed from the other projects considered so far in this chapter by retaining Shakespeare’s original language. Although Hamlet 360 could be watched on YouTube on a traditional computer screen, its creators urged audiences to view it through a VR headset in order to maximize its full, immersive potential. With such a headset on, spectators found themselves in the middle of an elegant but derelict theatre, emptied of its ground-floor seats and filled with objects that the production team characterized as ‘the faded detritus of his [Hamlet’s] life’ (‘Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit ’ 2019). Though the film was entirely pre-recorded, its creators attempted to generate feelings of embodied immersion by locating the viewer close to, and in some cases within, the scenes of performance. Cast in the role of Hamlet Senior—‘thy father’s spirit’—the spectator hovered over, zoomed into, and moved with the drama as it progressed. By relocating the 360-degree camera as scenes changed, and then smoothing the footage together in post-production, the artistic team transported the spectator to different locations within the space, as in a promenade-style performance. Audiences stood by the edge of Gertrude’s (Brooke Adams’s) bed in the closet scene, sat in one of the chairs set out alongside the characters during the play-within-a-play, and even went underwater with Hamlet (Jack Cutmore-Scott) as he tested his suicidal resolve during his ‘To be or not to be’ speech (3.1.58). ‘[I]t feels very much like you’re in the room with everybody’, commented Cutmore-Scott, while Matthew Niederhauser, the project’s cinematographer, explained how he and his collaborators designed the performance as if they were ‘playing it out for an ideal audience member of one’ (Harris 2019; ‘Hamlet 360: Virtual

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Reality Shakespeare’ 2019). Proximity, intimacy, and a sense of personalization guided the creation of Hamlet 360, much as they would in an in-person immersive show like Sleep No More. Also like Sleep No More was this production’s detailed, evocative set, designed by Clint Ramos and filled with stately but dilapidated furniture, dozens of lamps that blinked and popped when supernatural forces were present, and stacks of records, books, and other castoffs that suggested a once-happy, now-faded domestic life (Fig. 5.4). The influence of Punchdrunk was particularly apparent here, with the set’s moody palettes and decaying decadence conjuring an atmosphere reminiscent of Barrett’s company’s work. Also shared was a feeling of ghostly nostalgia for a past receding from view. In this sense, Hamlet 360 reiterated Steve Dixon’s assertion in the early 2000s that VR theatre tends to focus on ‘experiences that hark back to the past’, though in this case it was a far more recent history than the three-dimensional visualizations of ancient amphitheatres that Dixon discusses (2006: 24). Here the past was a more proximate and personal thing, with the vintage toys, clouded mirrors, and old, cathoderay television sets that filled the space gesturing both to Hamlet’s lost childhood and to a twentieth-century, pre-digital world that was slowly crumbling away. For Maler and his team, this ‘massive collage’ was a key component in Hamlet 360’s immersive design (Crawford 2019). Although audiences could not walk through and physically interact with the set, its visual richness did invite them to engage mentally and emotionally with it and, in this more abstract sense, be participants in it. ‘This dream world is both hyper-real and tangible as well as surreal and expressionistic’, the project’s description on YouTube reads; ‘It’s a rich and detailed environment that invites continual exploration and discovery’ (‘Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit ’ 2019). A large part of that process of exploration involved the freedom to look in any direction at any time, irrespective of whether the scene was taking place there. Such agency gave Hamlet 360 a distinctly theatrical charge, preserving the spectatorial ‘rights of reception’—as discussed in Chapter 3—that are so often associated with live performance settings (Cochrane and Bonner 2014: 127). Still, this project clearly differed from theatre—and indeed every other example discussed in this book—in that it was never performed for a live audience. As Maler explained in an interview, it presented spectators with a ‘new medium that’s neither film nor theater’, but a hybrid form that, according to one reviewer, offered both ‘the intimacy of film

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Fig. 5.4 Hamlet (Jack Cutmore-Scott) surrounded by objects from the production’s detailed set in Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit (2019), adapted and directed by Steven Maler for the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company in collaboration with Google. Production and cinematography by Sensorium, costume and production design by Clint Ramos, technical direction by Matthew Niederhauser and John Fitzgerald (Photograph by Matthew Niederhauser and reproduced courtesy of the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company)

and the grandeur of the stage’ (Crawford 2019). Perhaps more surprising to those outside the tech industry was that some would also question its status as VR. In his autobiographical history of the medium, Jaron Lanier has criticized the idea of VR as ‘spectacle’ without direct interaction: ‘If you can’t reach out and touch the virtual world and do something to it, you are a second-class citizen within it’ (2017: 6, 128). Some audience members who watched Hamlet 360 levied similar complaints, with one commenting that although 360-degree video is ‘immersive’, it is ultimately ‘pointless without the 6 degrees of freedom’ (‘Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit ’ 2019). What he meant by such a statement is that spectators lacked the ability to move and interact with Hamlet 360’s virtual world using positional tracking technology and hand controllers, which

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allow VR participants to manipulate objects and see their own bodies represented in the space. It would be another year before a VR adaptation of Shakespeare offered audiences such an opportunity. In July 2020, in the midst of global lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital art studio Tender Claws announced the launch of Tempest, directed by Samantha Gorman, which would be a live VR theatre experience embedded within its cult-hit videogame, ‘The Under Presents’ (see cover image). The latter had debuted in November the previous year, and like Hamlet 360 its premise and design suggested a debt to Punchdrunk. Dropped into a dark, sandy landscape, where crabs scuttled along the ground and the sound of a bass guitar thrummed in the distance, players entered the world of ‘The Under Presents’ through the door of an old dive bar. Upon entering, they discovered a surreal, byzantine environment composed, at various points, of an old cabaret, complete with musical acts; a network of rooms filled with objects that could be examined and moved; a mysterious ship called the Timeboat; and portals that temporarily transported them to fantastical locations based on characters’ memories and dreams. In the words of one of the game’s ardent fans, ‘This thing is weird. And I like it that way’ (‘The Under Presents’ 2020). Within this enigmatic world, characters played by live actors interacted with players in such an open-ended way that it eventually became clear that they were not, in fact, computer generated. ‘I’ll never forget the first time I came across one of the live actors’, wrote another enthusiastic participant. ‘I didn’t know it was a real person, I was like “wow this programming is impressive the way they interact and respond to people”’ (ibid.). This injection of live performance, and the excited response it generated among the game’s community, recalls the Punchdrunk/MIT project’s discovery that audiences will locate the human element in a digital production, even if it is intended to be operational rather than creative. Whether consciously or not, the producers of ‘The Under Presents’ addressed such a finding by deliberating casting performers—‘Improv artists, puppeteers and dancers’—in its project and creating an experience that would be ‘dynamic, unpredictable and, above all, completely individual’ to each player (Bradshaw 2020; Feltham 2020). This alone was enough to make waves in the VR world, but the addition of Tempest —a forty-five-minute, live, ticketed experience within the game—attracted the puzzled attention of the theatre community too. According to the critic Alexis Soloski, Tempest was ‘a technological first:

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a live, scripted, participatory play that you attend, from home, using a virtual reality headset’ (2020b). What happened within that headset was highly interactive, if somewhat less ‘Lynchian’ than the wider gaming experience of ‘The Under Presents’ (Feltham 2020). In groups of up to eight, audience members found themselves transported at a set time to a cinema lobby, where they explored the space, learned to cast spells, and practised interacting with one another in their shared costume: a cartoonlike, black silhouette, with a golden mask on their face and matching rings around their wrists. As in a Punchdrunk performance, spectators remained anonymous behind their masks, while the actor who guided them was rendered as a more human and personalized figure. When that figure did eventually take to the stage, audience members were relocated to a campfire in the Hollywood Hills, where their actor introduced him or herself and invited the audience to join an impromptu rehearsal of The Tempest (an ensemble of eighteen took turns playing the guide, who eventually assumed the role of Prospero) (‘Tempest Cast’ 2020). From here, audiences travelled to the sea to watch the Neapolitan ship go down, visited Prospero’s cave and collected objects in it, played out the courtship between Miranda and Ferdinand, and ate from the banqueting table until Ariel, in harpy form, came to chastise them. The experience was at once highly participatory and highly directed: as one participant put it, it was something of a cross between ‘a high school drama class exercise’ and a guided ‘walking tou[r]’ (Hayden 2020). What was far less pedestrian, however, was the fact that real people were joining one another in real time, and using their virtually rendered bodies to collect logs for Ferdinand or pass one of Miranda’s baby shoes to Prospero. ‘[I]t’s the social element that really makes The Under Presents’, wrote the tech reviewer Jamie Feltham about the gaming experience, and the same held true for its Shakespearean spinoff (2020). Being there was less about deep engagement with the themes and text of The Tempest —though both were present in parts—and more about coming together, in mind and body, even as people around the world were isolating themselves to a previously unknown degree. Every performance ended with the group circling back around the campfire, holding hands, and sometimes spontaneously offering one another hugs. Though the haptics of the equipment were not sophisticated enough to render the physical sensations of such an experience, reaching one’s arms out into space, and seeing them encircle another human presence, had its own emotional and cognitive pull. ‘I have existed for you the audience’,

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the guide told participants at the end of the performance, crediting the ‘magic’ of the show to the power of their collective, shared presence (Tender Claws 2020: 30). Gorman would later describe the entire enterprise as a kind of ‘magic circle’, in which performers invited audience members into an imaginative, interactive, and above all communal ‘realm of play’ (Sullivan 2022: 117). There is now a long history of VR either being the thing that is going to change the world, or a technological fad that is on the verge of obsolescence: as the tech journalists Peter Rubin and Jess Grey have comically suggested, ‘middle ground’ on the subject ‘is about as scarce as affordable housing in Silicon Valley’ (2020). This makes any conclusions about its promise and viability as a more widespread platform for performance difficult, if not impossible. But in experiential terms at least, VR technologies possess affordances attractive for theatre-making. The way they cordon off the play-world from the everyday, concentrating attention and intensifying feelings of physical presence, evokes many of the experiences and values prized by actors and audiences. The idea that such dynamics might also be created in a space unbounded by the restrictions of geography points towards ways that theatre in the online realm might go beyond that in the flesh: imagine attending a performance with loved ones who live far away, or watching a cast of actors based all over the world. Something staged in a haptically rich digital space that was as aesthetically engrossing as Hamlet 360, and as communally affirming as Tempest, would present audiences with a brave new world indeed.

5.4

Lockdown: Survival and Evolution

As exciting as an experiment like ‘The Under Presents: Tempest ’ was, VR was not the most common way that audiences experienced borndigital performances of Shakespeare during the COVID-19 pandemic. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, user access to VR technology has remained limited, with only about 5% of households in the UK and US having the necessary equipment in 2020 (Tankovska 2020). This meant that while initiatives like the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet 360 and Tender Claws’ Tempest might have gestured towards one possible future for digital Shakespearean performance, they weren’t particularly representative of its present. Between the ambitious if unwieldy social media projects of the early 2010s, and the high-tech, body-centric VR productions that emerged at the end of the decade, what inhabited

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the middle ground? The vast majority of digital performances mounted during the pandemic pointed towards a single, simple, and—by mid2020—everyday tool: the video-conferencing platform Zoom. When coronavirus lockdowns shuttered theatres in the US, UK, continental Europe, and to an extent other parts of the world, many arts institutions and even more freelancers moved their work online. If ‘Digital theatre’ was ‘once purely avant-garde’, Barbara Fuchs has posited, then by April 2020 it had irrefutably—and perhaps irreversibly—gone mainstream (2021: 28). In the early months of the global pandemic, companies and festivals as diverse as the National Theatre in London, The Wooster Group in New York, the Schaubühne in Berlin, the Craiova Shakespeare Festival in Romania, and the Kodomo Kyojin Theater Company in Osaka made recordings of past Shakespearean productions—sometimes from several decades ago, sometimes from just the past year—freely available online through platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and their own company websites (Allred et al. 2022: 221–2). Shakespeare was by no means the only playwright to feature in this outpouring of digital content, but his presence was particularly pronounced. ‘All the world with an internet connection has suddenly become a stage’, wrote Soloski for The New York Times, and ‘A lot of those stages have programmed Shakespeare’ (2020a). Aebischer has suggested that this tendency arose from people’s ‘need to group around something familiar that carries cultural capital at moments of crisis’, along with ‘the ready availability of Shakespeare in the archives of companies’ (2021: 9–10). Capital begets capital, with new forms of creativity looking to older ones—especially those that are copyright-free—as they jostle for place in a rapidly changing economy. Audiences also seemed drawn to the idea of Shakespeare as a ‘common good’ and means for self-improvement (ibid.: 10). In the early part of the pandemic, when many people assumed that disruptions to daily life would last a few months rather than stretch into years, spending one’s time becoming better acquainted with Shakespeare was not unlike other lockdown goals shared widely on social media: learning a new language, getting into shape, or baking the perfect sourdough loaf (‘Brits Turn’ 2020). But while many established theatres were busy making existing projects newly accessible online, other collectives, often recently formed, were focusing on creating original, made-for-lockdown work. Again, Shakespeare featured prominently: on 13 March, the day after Broadway closed in New York and a week before London’s West End followed suit, the

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Glasgow-based actor and director Rob Myles posted an invitation on Twitter. ‘In response to #Covid_19, I’m going to set up an online #Shakespeare play-reading group via Zoom … We have to do what we can to stay connected and creative over this time. Anyone interested?’ (@robmyles 2020) Less than a week later, Myles’s The Show Must Go Online (TSMGO) was born, making it one of the earliest contributors to the genre of Zoom theatre that would soon arise. This section looks at two examples of Shakespeare staged on Zoom, both of which took place in October 2020 and looked to Macbeth for inspiration. The first, Myles’s all-female and non-binary production for TSMGO, illustrated the potential for Zoom performance to open up theatre to new audiences and practitioners and to create a space for earnest, imaginative co-creation. The second, Zoë Seaton’s simultaneously filmic and interactive Macbeth, showed how a by-then ubiquitous platform like Zoom could become newly strange through a redefinition of the actor-audience relationship and the spatial and temporal dynamics in which it exists. Together, they illustrated how vividly (a)live, accessible theatre is possible even when actors and audiences never step foot in the same physical space. Myles’s TSMGO began with a live, dramatic reading of The Two Gentlemen of Verona on 19 March and continued with a new play every week as it made its way through Shakespeare’s canon. Professional and amateur actors around the world registered interest through an online form, with casting announced by the end of the week. Read-throughs and rehearsals then took place from Saturday afternoon to Wednesday morning, and the final performance streamed live from Zoom to YouTube on Wednesday evening at 7 p.m. UK time.4 Overall, more than 350 practitioners from six continents contributed to the project, which by July 2021 had been viewed over 200,000 times by people in more than sixty countries (recordings of all the performances remained available for free on YouTube after the live event) (‘Show Must Go Online’ 2021). As Myles put it in his introduction to one of the performances, TSMGO’s mission was to bring together ‘a global cast and crew of all levels of experience … to create Shakespeare for everyone, for free, forever’ (‘Show Must Go Online: Henry VIII ’ 2020). This commitment to inclusion and access, not only among audiences but also among practitioners, proved a defining feature of TSMGO’s contribution to digital Shakespearean performance.

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Myles’s Macbeth served this mission in a particularly direct way. Whereas previous TSMGO productions had applied gender-balanced and racially inclusive principles to their casting process, Macbeth took this ‘progressive vision for the future of theatre’ further by featuring an exclusively female-identifying and non-binary cast (a Global Majority Antony and Cleopatra performed entirely by actors of colour would follow the next week) (‘Show Must Go Online’ 2021). In a play described as Shakespeare’s ‘drama of anxious and competitive masculinity’, performers who specifically did not identify as men enacted its tragedy of aggression, succession, and psychological collapse (Prescott 2013: 6). It is all the more interesting, then, just how little comment this aspect of the production generated among its audiences during the performance. The YouTube chat was filled with hundreds of messages from viewers who enthusiastically discussed the performance as it unfolded, but few if any referred to TSMGO’s casting choices. This was in stark contrast to how gender-fluid casting in non-digital Shakespearean performance has sometimes been received among the wider public. In 2016, a survey of British audiences found that 48% were ‘against a woman playing Hamlet’, and elsewhere critics asked if the rise of female actors taking on traditionally male roles was ‘a bit manic and contrived’ or ‘A sellable gimmick rather than a genuine paradigm shift’ (Williams 2016; Elkin 2018). The easy, even uneventful acceptance of gender-fluid casting among TSMGO’s audiences illustrated what a supportive, progressive community Myles and his team had fostered in a short stretch of time. With a ‘commitment to diversity and inclusivity … from the very beginning’, TSMGO heralded a new vision for Shakespearean performance that was less white, less male, less establishment, and less moneyed than had long been the case in many theatre circles (Brewer et al. 2022: 154). It was also one that encouraged a reciprocal relationship between performers and audiences, resulting in a close-knit and enthusiastic network that Valerie Clayman Pye has called ‘a virtual Shakespeare fandom’ (2021: 4). Myles credited Zoom itself as a platform that made the company’s work ‘egalitarian and accessible’, presumably due to its simple design, global reach, and low subscription costs (Brewer et al. 2021). In both its emphasis on ‘identity-conscious casting’ and the power of digital tools to unsettle engrained hierarchies, TSMGO embraced values associated with ‘Gen Z’—roughly speaking, those born in the late 1990s to early 2010s— including everyday social activism and a wide-ranging ‘search for truth’ (Brewer et al. 2022: 155; Hatzipanagos 2021; Francis and Hoefel 2018).

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At the same time, the lack of comment on casting in TSMGO’s Macbeth also reflected the imagination-based, ‘poor theatre’ principles at the core of the company’s work—something Emily Ingram, TSMGO’s stage manager, characterized as its ‘homespun aesthetic’ (Brewer et al. 2022: 156). Props had to be made from materials at home and costumes cobbled together from clothes in the actors’ wardrobes, with the guidelines for the project prohibiting new purchases. Myles also asked actors to forego virtual backgrounds and, if they were comfortable with it, to reveal some of the domesticity of their own homes (ibid.: 157). With the actor playing Macbeth (Maryam Grace) wielding a tinfoil sword, donning a paper crown, and performing most of her scenes in front of an oak dresser in her living room, it made little difference that she presented as a woman rather than as a man (Fig. 5.5). This was a world in which imaginative complicity among performers and audiences mattered far more than customary gestures towards naturalism. As Benjamin Broadribb has argued, many Zoom productions of Shakespeare during the pandemic featured such ‘childlike sincerity and enthusiasm’, which invited actors and audiences to forge ‘affective connection’ through mutual games of ‘make-believe’ (2022: 52, 55). While such communal play-acting was the clearest and arguably most powerful way in which audiences helped make lockdown projects like TSMGO work, another route was through their more technical, mental piecing together of the three-dimensional performance space that the

Fig. 5.5 Lady Macbeth (Katrina Allen), Macbeth (Maryam Grace), and the audience chat after the banquet in Macbeth (2020), directed by Rob Myles for The Show Must Go Online (Screenshot)

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Zoom stage evoked. TSMGO’s performers almost always delivered their lines to the camera, as if it were the scene partner to which they were speaking, rather than directing their eye-line outside the frame, as in most television and films. While in practical terms this choice arose partly from the need for actors to read from their scripts on screen—the compact rehearsal timeline did not allow for parts to be fully memorized—the result was a direct and intimate form of address that allowed audiences to look into the performers’ eyes at almost all times. This choice also positioned viewers in the middle of a scene’s dialogue, which TSMGO always presented in Zoom’s split-screen ‘gallery view’ as opposed to its singlepicture ‘speaker view’. Rather than being seated outside the performance space, as is typically the case with in-person theatre, audience members were located within it, much in the way that some of the camerawork discussed in Chapter 3 situated spectators on stage with the actors. Visual proximity of this kind is almost always temporary in broadcasts, with the camera constantly switching between closer-up and more distant perspectives. But TSMGO always placed spectators within the performance, with its actors using movement cues to indicate how the imagined three-dimensional playing space that surrounded the viewer was changing. They leaned into the camera to suggest movement towards one another, for instance, as when Macbeth and Banquo (Shalyn BassMcFaul) discussed Ross and Angus’s revelation that Macbeth would indeed become Thane of Cawdor. Elsewhere, they mapped out spatial relationships when they appeared to pass props from one Zoom window to another, as when Ross (Corinna Brown) offered Macbeth a medal connected to his new title. In other scenes, Macbeth and Banquo tilted their cameras as they kneeled before Duncan (Joanne Randle), while Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Katrina Allen) executed particularly skilful choreography when they tumbled into bed together during their reunion in Act One and slumped to the floor in despair after the banquet in Act Three. In all cases, audience members were located at the meeting point of these interactions, with the performance inviting them to imagine the three-dimensional blocking that the actors’ movements signalled through their screens. Like a geometric net diagram, which consists of a simple, two-dimensional map that can be folded into a shape such as a cube or pyramid, the Zoom display for TSMGO’s Macbeth offered viewers a series of rectangles that they might mentally prise up and reorganize into the world-in-the-round that the performance evoked. In this way, they were

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not only co-collaborators in TSMGO’s gleeful game of make-believe, but also fellow architects of the multi-dimensional, dynamic performance spaces that its productions fashioned. Though they did not take on roles in the way that participants in Such Tweet Sorrow or ‘The Under Presents: Tempest ’ did, they were still essential makers in its creative world. This heavy emphasis on imaginative co-creation between audience and performers might suggest that A Midsummer Night’s Dream would be the Shakespearean play most suited for TSMGO and similar Zoom productions. With its celebration of the way that ‘imagination bodies forth/ The forms of things unknown’, and its insistence that ‘never anything can be amiss/ When simpleness and duty tender it’, the comedy lovingly champions the kind of earnest, committed art-making that characterized so many digital productions of Shakespeare during the COVID-19 lockdowns (5.1.14–15, 82–3). Dream did indeed loom large in the early months of pandemic theatre-making, as did The Tempest with its exploration of magic, escapism, and reunion, but by October 2020 the light-hearted tone of many Zoom stagings of Shakespeare had begun to wane (Allred et al. 2022: 223, 242). With days getting shorter in the Northern Hemisphere and coronavirus cases rising globally once again, the grim claustrophobia and world-weariness of Macbeth seemed to suit the autumnal mood of that moment better than the delights of festive comedy. While the apposite timing of TSMGO’s production came by chance— Myles and his team were working through the canon in roughly chronological order, and Macbeth happened to fall in October—another company, Big Telly, produced its own Zoom-based take on the play especially for this darker, All Hallows season. Located in Portstewart, Northern Ireland, Big Telly has made site-specific theatrical work for decades, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that its inventive performance practices started garnering major attention internationally. In April 2020 its Artistic Director, Zoë Seaton, directed an interactive, Zoom production of The Tempest in collaboration with Lucy Askew of Creation Theatre Company in Oxford. Ananda Pellerin of CNN described the project as ‘a surprise hit’ and a hopeful sign that online performance might be able to ‘help save the theater industry’ from the difficult circumstances brought on by pandemic lockdowns (2020). Written in May 2020, Pellerin’s article featured other digital theatre-makers discussing the ‘state of emergency’ that the performing arts were in, with Lekan Lawal, director of the London production of Hamilton, explaining, ‘As a sector we’re

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just trying to … make sure we can survive the next three months’ (ibid.). Sadly, the impact of COVID-19 would extend far beyond the summer, with Big Telly’s Macbeth, also directed by Seaton, not even marking the midpoint in this highly disrupted time. The spectre of the pandemic haunted Seaton’s production, which Aebischer has astutely characterized as ‘unsettling’ and ‘carnivalesque’, from its outset (2021: 74, 77). Rather than the expected three witches in the opening scene, audiences saw three politicians standing at podiums in a manner that parodied the UK government’s daily coronavirus press briefings. The Boris Johnson-like politician in the centre (Aonghus Óg McAnally) began by greeting the audience and acknowledging that they were all ‘living in unprecedented times’, before going on to identify further measures that might be taken ‘against this scourge of witchcraft’. The politician to the left (Lucia McAnespie) then took over, encouraging audiences to turn on their cameras and hold up pieces of paper with the names of the places from which they were watching. In contrast to TSMGO, spectators for this production (and Askew and Seaton’s Tempest before it) were part of the same Zoom call as its five actors, meaning that they could interact visually and sonically with the production if they wanted. ‘[I]t is through this collective action, this community solidarity’, the first actor commented, ‘that we can overcome and persevere’. This opening scene established an interactive, metatheatrical conceit that would extend throughout the production. The three politicians soon metamorphosed into the three witches, who stage-managed the events of the play from an abandoned theatre and called on audiences to participate during key scenes. But while such features might have initially suggested that Seaton’s Macbeth would follow Myles’s in its recruitment of the audience as exuberant co-collaborators, her production soon turned away from gleeful participation and towards something much more sombre. Moving to the heath, where Macbeth (Dennis Herdman) and Banquo (Dharmesh Patel) encountered the Weird Sisters for the first time, the actors avoided direct addresses to the camera except during soliloquys and asides. In doing so, they stayed within what Aebischer has described as the ‘fictional locus’ of the Zoom playing space, or the imaginative world of the performance that is separate from the audience (2021: 61). In contrast to TSMGO, the actors directed their lines to an imagined scene partner out of frame, with Zoom’s ‘speaker view’ switching back and forth between the actors in a single-channel feed that resembled shot-reverse-shot sequencing. Seaton and her team also ‘cut’ to wider

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shots of the scene in some moments, pinning characters’ Zoom boxes together using the platform’s spotlight feature and producing a sense of continuous, joined-up space (Fig. 5.6). The fact that the production also made extensive use of virtual backgrounds to establish its settings; featured atmospheric, musical underscoring throughout; incorporated extreme close ups into its most emotionally fraught moments; and presented the first half of the drama in black and white aligned it at least as much with the conventions of film as those of live, in-person theatre. This filmic quality did not, however, result in naturalism. Actors often appeared deliberately out of proportion with their backgrounds, producing a surreal mismatch between people, objects, and settings—a ‘weird’ aesthetic, one might say. Heidi Liedke and Monika PietrzakFranger have observed how the virtual backgrounds used to represent the Macbeths’ castle were at once ‘hyper-real’ and ‘fake-looking’, particularly once the production shifted to colour and the lurid hues of the castle’s Rococo-style walls became apparent (2021: 138). The vivid artificiality of such scenes was further exaggerated by the mundane familiarity of Lady Macbeth’s (Nicky Harley’s) and Lady Macduff’s (McAnespie’s) homes. Here, the actors appeared in domestic settings that mirrored the audiences’ own surroundings: ‘Reclining on her IKEA bed, laptop at hand, Lady Macbeth … could be any one of us as we are watching the play’ (ibid.). By shifting between the utterly common and the unsettlingly strange, Seaton’s Macbeth dislocated viewers’ sense of where they were and the kind of performance they were watching. Moving from political parody to lo-fi horror to surrealist homage, the production seized upon

Fig. 5.6 Macbeth (Dennis Herdman) and Banquo (Dharmesh Patel) sharing the digital stage through Zoom spotlighting in Macbeth (2020), directed by Zoë Seaton for Big Telly (Screenshot)

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the linguistic juxtapositions so central to Shakespeare’s tragedy—fair is foul, good is ill, heaven is hell—and imagined them into a contorted, uncanny world full of hallucinatory menace. Like many of the intermedial productions that I discussed in Chapter 4, Seaton’s Macbeth played with audiences’ expectations about digital technology and the way it shapes their experiences of time and space. As with most Zoom productions, this Macbeth featured individual actors in individual frames, though it frequently broke out of this format by using pre-recorded sequences and vision mixing, the latter of which allowed Seaton’s team to layer multiple actors into the same video frame. In these moments, the name at the bottom of the Zoom window switched to Hecate—an otherwise unseen character—aligning technological experimentation with the magic and danger of witchcraft. In the banquet scene, for instance, some audience members who had their cameras on found themselves projected around the production’s dining table courtesy of vision mixing, while elsewhere the insertion of recorded video opened up the geography and temporality of the performance in startling ways. The most striking of these pre-recorded sequences came at the end, as Seaton and her team mixed a live feed of Macbeth delivering his ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ soliloquy with previously filmed footage of Lady Macbeth walking slowly across an empty Irish beach and into the sea (5.5.18–19). As with the shepherd scene in Ivo van Hove’s Kings of War, discussed in Chapter 4, this evocative and clearly not-live film was at the same time powerfully alive. Though it signalled unequivocally to audiences that recorded footage had been used, potentially weakening their sense of real-time connectedness, it also injected multi-dimensionality and even freedom into what had so far been a very closeted and psychologically cramped production. As Aebischer has written, the sequence offered ‘a hauntingly beautiful sense of liberation from the oppressiveness of intruding gazes and her [Lady Macbeth’s] locked-down domestic prison’ (2021: 85). In releasing Lady Macbeth from the confines of her room, the production simultaneously released the viewer from the visual and experiential monotony of Zoom, which by this point in the pandemic had become a constant and often fatiguing presence in many people’s lives. In doing so, it suggested that there was indeed ‘a world elsewhere’, beyond the strictures of lockdown and certainly beyond the cage-like grid of video-conferencing screens (Coriolanus , 3.3.139).

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There are many points of connection between Myles’s and Seaton’s Macbeths, both of which were produced in the UK, performed on Zoom, and presented in the same month. Each production sought to cultivate experiences of community and connectedness at a dark moment in modern history, while also making theatre accessible to a more diverse range of audiences and practitioners. Like TSMGO, Big Telly rightfully celebrated its digital productions’ global reach and more inclusive format, with the company welcoming ‘audiences where geographic or socioeconomic impediments are in the way’, as well as ‘non-neurotypical people or people with physical disabilities’ (O’Donovan et al. 2022: 204). For both organizations, digital technology offered a way of levelling hierarchical structures within the theatre industry and injecting an egalitarian spirit back into the art form. At the same time, the kinds of born-digital, Zoom-based theatre that the two groups produced were notably different. Whereas TSMGO focused on collaborative play-making with its audiences, blurring the lines between professional and amateur, performer and spectator, prosaic reality and enchanting make-believe, Big Telly explored how a mundane platform like Zoom might temporarily become extraordinary through moments of inventive and even bewitching performance. In a talk about her company’s work, Seaton described how she and her team like to focus on ‘hijacking the familiar’, both online and off (2021). ‘We are a site-specific theatre company’ that is ‘very interested in taking spaces that people know well and then disrupting them’, she explained. For her, such a process creates the ‘possibility that magic can happen in the real world’, including the over-common and often wearying domain of video conferencing (ibid.). While neither production strove for realism, the kind of theatrical magic they conjured took on distinct forms. Myles’s Macbeth celebrated the joy of shared presence, especially when the people involved represent a wider range of backgrounds and identities than has often been the case in mainstream theatre. Seaton’s Macbeth, in turn, was more interested in de-familiarizing the kinds of experience associated with Zoom and introducing surprise into a seemingly stable and even banal platform. Thinking back to the lessons learned from Punchdrunk’s online version of Sleep No More, it sought to ‘creat[e] a space removed from the everyday’ that might release viewers, at least temporarily, from the monotony and fear of pandemic life (Dixon et al. 2012: 10).

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Although the internet is not by default participatory, its ability to support social interaction is arguably the quality that has made it so indispensable in twenty-first-century, daily life. Back in 1989, Berners-Lee designed the web first and foremost as a way of organizing pre-existing information, but millions of people since then have found its capacity for new content creation, and the social exchange that surrounds it, at least as important. Self-performance is a guiding principle of the social media platforms that have become so central to internet culture, with the once relatively private lives of individuals taking on a newly public status. This is presumably why more than 60% of Gen Z members and Millennials surveyed in 2021 in the US agreed that ‘how you present yourself online is more important than how you present yourself in-person’ (in comparison, just 38% of Gen X respondents and 28% of Baby boomers felt similarly) (‘Squarespace Survey’ 2021). Digital life for a growing number of people is real life, even if what happens there differs in important ways from what takes place offline. Theatre-makers have, accordingly, sought to test how live performance might work in this very real, yet still uncertain space, looking to technologies as various as multiplayer videogames, social media platforms, VR, and video conferencing to serve as born-digital stages. As this chapter has shown, experiments with each medium have offered insights into what audiences want from theatre and how digital technologies might meet such desires—as well as how they have fallen short. From the diffuseness of social media to the inaccessibility of VR to the mundanity of Zoom, finding and retaining the attention of online spectators is no easy task. Cultivating engrossing forms of community that cross traditional actoraudience divides has proved one way of keeping participants involved in digital theatre productions, as has inviting them to take active roles in the projects’ performative worlds. Compelling in a different way has been the ingenious use of seemingly familiar technologies, a tactic that aligns certain born-digital projects with the kinds of intermedial work discussed in Chapter 4. Overall, though, what is most distinctive and unifying about the diverse body of work explored in this chapter is its capacity to facilitate human connection through dramatic storytelling—in this case Shakespearean—across geographical and social divides. In understanding theatre as an activity rather than as a place, born-digital performance has vastly expanded who the art form might reach and what its future could be.

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Notes 1. Part of this chapter first appeared as ‘Shakespeare, Social Media, and the Digital Public Sphere’ (2018), Shakespeare 14:1, 64–79, available online: 10.1080/17450918.2018.1439092. I am grateful to Taylor and Francis for permission to republish this material. 2. Neither of these digital projects has been archived in the RSC’s official collection. Details about them in this chapter come from my own notes as an audience member; the Such Tweet Sorrow fan archive (http://www.ble ysmaynard.net/suchtweet/); and searches on Twitter and Google+ before the latter was disbanded. 3. At the time of writing these posts were still available on Twitter; I have anonymized them following the guidance set out in Fazel (2016). 4. Many thanks to Hannah Young, who played King John and Hermione for The Show Must Go Online, for sharing the rehearsal and performance timeline with me. All days and times refer to Greenwich Mean Time/Coordinated Universal Time, though actors and audiences participated from time zones around the world.

Productions Consulted Barrett, Felix and Maxine Doyle (2014) Sleep No More, Punchdrunk, New York, 10 May [seen again on 17 December 2015]. Doran, Gregory, Sarah Ellis, and Tea Uglow (2013) Midsummer Night’s Dreaming, in collaboration with Google Creative Labs, Royal Shakespeare Company grounds and Google+, Stratford-upon-Avon and online [subsequently accessed through Google+ until April 2019]. Gorman, Samantha (2020) ‘The Under Presents: Tempest ’, Tender Claws, Oculus online gaming platform, 8 and 9 August [accessed using an Oculus Rift]. Hytner, Nicholas (2019) A Midsummer Night’s Dream, starring Gwendoline Christie and Oliver Chris, The Bridge Theatre, London, August. Maler, Steven (2019) Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, starring Jack CutmoreScott, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company in collaboration with Google, YouTube [using Google Cardboard, Oculus Go, and Oculus Rift], 24 January, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc88G7nkV-Q [accessed 15 February 2022]. Myles, Rob (2020) Macbeth, starring Maryam Grace and Katrina Allen, The Show Must Go Online, YouTube, 7 October, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=XAAI_c65nZY [accessed 15 February 2022]. Seaton, Zoë (2020) Macbeth, starring Dennis Herdman and Nicky Harley, Big Telly, Zoom, 31 October [subsequently accessed through the company’s private online archive].

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Silbert, Roxana (2010) Such Tweet Sorrow, in collaboration with Mudlark, Twitter [subsequently accessed through Twitter and the fan-generated archive at http://www.bleysmaynard.net/suchtweet/] [accessed 15 February 2022].

Works Cited Aebischer, Pascale (2016) ‘Performing Shakespeare through Social Media’, in Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett (eds) Shakespeare in Our Time: A Collection of the Shakespeare Association of America, London: Bloomsbury, 99–103. Aebischer, Pascale (2021) Viral Shakespeare: Performance in the Time of Pandemic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allred, Gemma Kate, Benjamin Broadribb, and Erin Sullivan (2022) ‘Lockdown Performance: An Extended Year in Review’, in Allred, Broadribb, and Sullivan (eds) Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation, London: Bloomsbury, 219–58. @andydickson (2013) Twitter, 24 June, https://twitter.com/andydickson/sta tus/349145838867578881 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Arthur, Charles (2007) ‘The Problem with Shakespeare in Games’, The Guardian, 7 December, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/ 2007/dec/07/theproblemwithshakespearei [accessed 15 February 2022]. Baker, Chris (2008) ‘Exploring Arden: Is the Shakespearean MMOG a Blast or a Bore?’, Wired, 2 May, https://www.wired.com/2008/05/pl-games-ss-3/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Bay-Cheng, Sarah (2012) ‘Theatre is Media: Some Principles for a Digital Historiography of Performance’, Theater 42:2, 27–41. Berners-Lee, Timothy (1998) ‘Information Management: A Proposal’, https:// www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Biggin, Rose May (2014) ‘Audience Immersion: Environment, Interactivity, and Narrative in the Work of Punchdrunk’, PhD thesis, University of Exeter. Bloom, Gina (2015) ‘Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences Through Theater-Making Games’, Shakespeare Studies 43, 114–27. Bloom, Gina (2018) Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of the English Commercial Theater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bradshaw, Tim (2020) ‘Enter the Mirrorworld: How Virtual Reality Will Shape the 2020s’, Financial Times, 1 January, https://www.ft.com/content/461 405d2-20fd-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b [accessed 15 February 2022]. Brewer, Dominic, et al. (2021) unpublished extended interview with Gemma Kate Allred and Benjamin Broadribb, January.

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Brewer, Dominic, et al. (2022) ‘“Shakespeare for Everyone”: The Show Must Go Online in Conversation with Gemma Kate Allred and Benjamin Broadribb’, in Allred, Broadribb, and Erin Sullivan (eds) Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation, London: Bloomsbury, 149–59. British Council (2015) ‘Shakespeare Lives: A Global Celebration of William Shakespeare on the 400th Anniversary of His Death’, Shakespeare Lives Programme, https://www.shakespearelives.org/programme/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Brits Turn Self-Isolation into Self-Improvement’ (2020) Aldermore Newsroom, 3 September, https://www.aldermore.co.uk/about-us/newsroom/2020/ 09/brits-turn-self-isolation-into-self-improvement-with-three-fifths-investingin-themselves-during-lockdown/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Broadribb, Benjamin (2022) ‘Lockdown Shakespeare and the Metamodern Sensibility’, in Gemma Kate Allred, Broadribb, and Erin Sullivan (eds) Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation, London: Bloomsbury, 45–63. Bushnell, Rebecca W. and Michael Ullyot (forthcoming) ‘Shakespeare and Virtual Reality’, in Clifford Werier and Paul Budra (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface, Abingdon: Routledge. Calbi, Maurizio (2013) Spectral Shakespeares: Media Adaptations in the TwentyFirst Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Cavendish, Dominic (2013) ‘Midsummer Night’s Dreaming, Online and in Stratford’, The Telegraph, 23 June, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/the atre/theatre-reviews/10138803/Midsummer-Nights-Dreaming-online-andin-Stratford-review.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Cochrane, Bernadette and Frances Bonner (2014) ‘Screening from the Met, the NT, or the House: What Changes with the Live Relay’, Adaptation 7:2, 121– 33. Conley, Paul (2017) ‘Intel Shows off Motion-Capture Tech Powering The Tempest via Sensory Snapchat Ad’, Mobile Marketer, 22 August, https:// www.marketingdive.com/news/intel-shows-off-motion-capture-tech-pow ering-the-tempest-via-sensory-snap/503182/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Crawford, John (2019) ‘To Be or Not to Be—Now in Virtual Reality’, Babson Thought & Action, 28 January, https://entrepreneurship.babson.edu/hamletvirtual-reality/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. DiNucci, Darcy (1999) ‘Fragmented Future’, Print 32, 220–2, http://darcyd. com/fragmented_future.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. Dixon, Steve (2006) ‘A History of Virtual Reality in Performance’, International Journal of Performance Arts in Digital Media 2:1, 23–54. Dixon, Dan, Jon Rogers, and Paul Eggleston (2012) ‘Between Worlds: Report for Nesta on MIT/Punchdrunk Theatre Sleep No More Digital R&D

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Project’, https://www.academia.edu/10745204/Between_Worlds_Report_ on_MIT_Punchdrunk_Sleep_No_More_Digital_R_and_D_Project [accessed 15 February 2022]. Dobson, Michael (2011) Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elkin, Susan (2018) ‘Have Directors Gone Gender-Blind Manic?’, My Theatre Mates, 10 August, https://mytheatremates.com/conventional-casting-stillhas-an-important-role-susan/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Fazel, Valerie (2016) ‘Researching YouTube Shakespeare: Literary Scholars and the Ethical Challenges of Social Media’, Borrowers and Lenders 10:1, https:// openjournals.libs.uga.edu/borrowers/article/view/2430/2528 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Feltham, Jamie (2020) ‘“The Under Presents” Is Live VR Theater by Way of David Lynch’, UploadVR, 24 April, https://uploadvr.com/the-under-pre sents-impressions/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Fowler, Geoffrey A. (2012) ‘Facebook: One Billion and Counting’, The Wall Street Journal, 4 October, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000087239 6390443635404578036164027386112 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Francis, Tracy and Fernanda Hoefel (2018) ‘“True Gen”: Generation Z and Its Implications for Companies’, McKinsey, 12 November, https://www.mck insey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/true-gen-gen eration-z-and-its-implications-for-companies [accessed 15 February 2022]. Fuchs, Barbara (2021) Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic, London: Methuen. Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday. Greatley-Hirsch, Brett and Michael Best (2017) ‘“Within This Wooden [2.]O”: Shakespeare and New Media in the Digital Age’, in Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby (eds) The Shakespearean World, London: Routledge, 443–62. ‘Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit —Shakespeare in VR’ (2019) YouTube, 24 January, https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Jc88G7nkV-Q [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Hamlet 360: Virtual Reality Shakespeare’ (2019) Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, Folger Shakespeare Library, 16 April, https://www.folger.edu/shakespeareunlimited/hamlet-virtual-reality [accessed 15 February 2022]. Hansen, Lauren (2009) ‘What Happened to Second Life?’, BBC News, 20 November, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8367957.stm [accessed 15 February 2022]. Harris, Elizabeth A. (2019) ‘Hamlet in Virtual Reality Casts the Viewer in the Play’, The New York Times, 25 January, https://www.nytimes. com/2019/01/25/theater/hamlet-virtual-reality-google.html [accessed 15 February 2022].

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Hatzipanagos, Rachel (2021) ‘Gen Z is Making Change, One Protest at a Time’, The Washington Post, 15 March, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nat ion/2021/03/15/gen-z-is-making-change-one-protest-time/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Hayden, Scott (2020) ‘“The Under Presents” Redefines Immersive Theater in Live VR Retelling of The Tempest ’, RoadtoVR, 6 July, https://www.roadtovr. com/the-under-presents-immersive-theater-tempest/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Holland, Peter (2007) ‘Shakespeare Abbreviated’, in Robert Shaughnessy (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 26–45. Holland, Peter (2009) ‘Performing Shakespeare for the Web Community’, in Alexa Alice Joubin and Charles S. Ross (eds) Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace, West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 252–62. Kirwan, Peter (2013) ‘Midsummer Night’s Dreaming (RSC/Google+)’, The Bardathon, 22 June, https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2013/06/ 22/midsummer-nights-dreaming-rscgoogle/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Lanier, Jaron (2017) Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey through Virtual Reality, London: Bodley Head. Laurel, Brenda (1993) Computers as Theatre, Boston: Addison-Wesley. Levine, Lawrence W. (1988) Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Liedke, Heidi and Monika Pietrzak-Franger (2021) ‘Viral Theatre: Preliminary Thoughts on the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Online Theatre’, JCDE: Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 9:1, 128–44. Lonergan, Patrick (2016) Theatre & Social Media, London: Palgrave. Losh, Elizabeth (2008) ‘“The Play’s the Thing”: The Arden “Failure” and the Future of the Educational Games Movement’, Meaningful Play Conference, Michigan State University, unpublished paper, https://eee.uci.edu/faculty/ losh/MeaningfulPlay.pdf [accessed 29 June 2020]. Makarov, Vladimir (2016) ‘“What Did You Enact?”: Shakespeare and/in Computer Games’, World Shakespeare Congress, University of Birmingham and Kings College London, unpublished paper. Moffat, Katie (2013) ‘How the RSC Used Google+ to Run a Bold Experiment in Digital Theatre’, CultureHive, https://www.culturehive.co.uk/wp-con tent/uploads/2013/10/Using-Google-to-run-a-bold-experiment-in-digitaltheatre1.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. Murphy, Andrew (2008) Shakespeare for the People: Working-Class Readers, 1800– 1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murray, Janet H. (2016) Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, New York: The Free Press.

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Muse, John H. (2012) ‘140 Characters in Search of a Theater: Twitter Plays’, Theater 42:2, 43–63. O’Donovan, Crissy, et al. (2022) ‘“Present Fears are Less than Horrible Imaginings”: Big Telly Theatre Company in Conversation with Gemma Kate Allred and Benjamin Broadribb’, in Allred, Broadribb, and Erin Sullivan (eds) Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation, London: Bloomsbury, 195–205. Osborne, Laurie (2010) ‘iShakespeare: Digital Art/Games, Intermediality, and the Future of Shakespearean Film’, Shakespeare Studies 38, 48–57. Pearson, Erika (2009) ‘All the World Wide Web’s a Stage: The Performance of Identity in Online Social Networks’, First Monday 14:3, https://firstmonday. org/article/view/2162/2127 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Pellerin, Ananda (2020) ‘Can Online Shows Help Save the Theater Industry?’, CNN , 20 May, https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/theaters-uk-pandemicdiversity/index.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Prescott, Paul (2013) Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pye, Valerie Clayman (2021) ‘Performance Review of Zoom Shakespeare: The Show Must Go Online and “Read for the Globe”’, PARtake 3:2, 1–8. Ray, Romita (2011) ‘The Beast in a Box: Playing with Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Visual Resources 22:1, 7–31. Reaney, Mark (1999) ‘Virtual Reality and the Theatre: Immersion in Virtual Worlds’, Digital Creativity 10:3, 183–8. Rheingold, Howard (1991) Virtual Reality, London: Secker and Warburg. Ritzer, George, Paul Dean, and Nathan Jurgenson (2012) ‘The Coming of Age of the Prosumer’, American Behavioral Scientist 56:4, 379–98. @robmyles (2020) Twitter, 13 March, https://twitter.com/robmyles/status/ 1238543541741199361 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Rowe, Katherine (2010) ‘Crowd-Sourcing Shakespeare: Screen Work and Scene Play in Second Life’, Shakespeare Studies 38, 58–67. Rubin, Peter and Jess Grey (2020) ‘The Wired Guide to Virtual Reality’, Wired, 8 March, https://www.wired.com/story/wired-guide-to-virtual-rea lity/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Scheil, Katherine West (2012) She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Seaton, Zoë (2021) ‘Hijacking the Familiar: The Work of Big Telly Theatre Company’, keynote speech at Post-Covid-Art Conference, Hannover, Germany and online, 23 July. ‘The Shakspere Oracle, or, Wheel of Fortune’ (1892) Cardgame, Boston: D. Lothrop & Company, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, ART Flat c25.

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CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

Just shy of a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the director and academic Jared Mezzocchi published an essay on the present, and future, of digital theatre-making. ‘At this very moment, the theatre industry is being thrust into a site-specific venue called the internet’, he wrote, before outlining the principles he believed theatre-makers needed to abide by in order for pandemic-era digital experimentation to have a lasting effect on whatever came next (Mezzocchi 2021). The first principle was that digital theatre needed to be temporally live: ‘theatre must stop making films during the pandemic’, he argued, lest it become dependent on practices ‘that are irrelevant to our form once we return to being in-person’. For Mezzocchi, theatre is defined by its insistence on ‘imagination in the present moment’, meaning that anything that is overly reliant on prerecorded, post-produced material starts to shift into another category of art-making. Though his enthusiasm for digital technology and the screens that come with it distinguished his ideas in fundamental ways from those of Peggy Phelan, discussed in Chapter 2, his emphasis on theatre a a function of presentness, presence, and, ‘unapologetically, mortality’ helped establish deep, if unexpected, resonances between these two schools of thought (ibid.). Mezzocchi’s second principle was that, pandemic or no pandemic, theatre-makers had to engage with digital technology if they wanted their art form to retain currency in the modern world. ‘If theatre aims to hold © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Sullivan, Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice, Shakespeare in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05763-2_6

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a mirror up to society, we as theatre artists must embrace the fact that digital life is as important as real life’, he wrote; we ‘must wield technology as much as [our] audiences do in order to even begin to impact the future of our culture’ (ibid.). Like Nathan Jurgenson, whose critique of ‘digital dualism’ I also explored in Chapter 2, Mezzocchi posited that it was no longer possible to think of life in the twenty-first century in binary terms (Jurgenson 2011). Digital life is real life, both writers stressed, with technologically mediated interactions defining contemporary experience at least as much as those that happen offline, in a place that 1980s cyberpunk authors vividly dubbed the ‘meatspace’. This book has shown how such realizations were already starting to have an impact on mainstream Shakespearean theatre-making in the decade leading up to the pandemic. From 2009 onwards, high definition, multi-camera live broadcasting had been influencing the theatre landscape in the UK and other parts of the world, while the growing use of live video and three-dimensional projections on the in-person stage had been prompting discussions about the way screens focus and distort attention, in both the theatre and everyday life. Born-digital theatre-making had been less common, but high-profile experiments with social media and virtual reality technologies had started to chart how performance might work on an entirely online stage. Still, there is no question that the events surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic radically accelerated digital innovation in the theatre industry and beyond. Countless articles published during that time stated that ‘The Future Is Hybrid’, and accordingly that both workplaces and educational institutions would continue to blend in-person and online modes of experience long after the pandemic had subsided (Malkani 2021; ‘Future of Work’ 2021; Govil 2021). One might assume that those in the theatre industry were thinking in similar terms, with the expansion of online streaming and fully digital performance during the pandemic ushering live drama towards a more integrated, hybrid future. And yet, comments from institutions, artists, and critics were mixed. Whereas Mezzocchi argued that ‘theatre’s identity is not lost in the digital, but instead enhanced in it’, others found that their experience of online performance only reconfirmed their dedication to theatre as an in-person art form (2021). ‘I find that virtual theatre, Zoom theatre, really leaves me wanting’, commented Carrie Van Hallgren, a US-based theatre producer, in an article about the future of digital theatre post-pandemic, and Kim Greenawalt, another theatre professional,

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agreed: ‘While virtual theatre may increase accessibility, there is something about it that is inherently not theatre … Actors cannot relate to an audience and audience members cannot relate to actors as they could in person’ (Brownlow-Calkin 2021). Such scepticism could also be found among those committed to other kinds of digital theatre-making. The intermedial director Annie Dorsen, whose A Piece of Work (2013) I discussed in Chapters 1 and 4, found herself similarly underwhelmed by fully online performance. ‘I work with technology but in a space where people can gather together at the same time’, she explained in an interview conducted a year into the pandemic; ‘in a funny way, I mess with everything in the theatre, acting and narrative, but what I don’t mess with is that we come together in a room to share an experience’ (McNulty 2021). As a result, she had taken a break from theatre during the pandemic, choosing instead to devote her unexpectedly free time to other interests and skills. For her and many others, the sudden and intense expansion of digitized interaction reiterated what was being lost during the pandemic rather than what might be gained. Like the technology forecaster Sean Monahan, who observed ‘that a Zoom call is very much not the same thing as hugging your mom’, and the theatre critic Laura Collins-Hughes, who lamented the ‘sterility of the screen’ and the way it makes you ‘lose awareness of your own body’, they found that these new forms of online togetherness made them miss the experience of in-person, physical communion all the more (Monahan 2021; Collins-Hughes 2021). Dualist thinking persisted during this time, and in some cases even grew in strength. To a large extent, such debates about whether digital theatre is theatre—and if it is, whether it is any good—have always been, and will always remain, highly subjective matters of individual preference. But they also have wider, more practical implications. In the US, the Actors’ Equity Association (AEA)—the union responsible for live, inperson theatre events—and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA)—the union responsible for work transmitted via film, television, and radio—found themselves in a dispute during the pandemic about who should oversee online performance and make decisions about its labour practices and fees. Was this rapidly evolving art form more like theatre or film? After months of uncertainty, the unions reached an agreement in November 2020 stating that AEA would have jurisdiction over

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work that is recorded and/or produced to be exhibited on a digital platform, either as a replacement for a live theater production … that cannot take place because of the pandemic or for a partially virtual/digital audience that supplements a live audience during the pandemic period. (‘Agreement’ 2020: 1)

In the first instance, ‘the pandemic period’ would stretch until 31 December 2021, with the possibility of an extension depending on global events. Any work covered in the agreement had to be ticketed, had to have set limits as to how many people could watch it at once, could not be distributed on streaming platforms like Netflix or Amazon Prime, and had to be filmed chronologically with minimal post-production editing (ibid.: 1–3). In sum, it had to be as similar to in-person theatre as possible. Practitioners should understand it as a ‘replacement’ or ‘supplement’ for more traditional forms of theatre, rather than as a creative work in its own right. The implicit assumption was that after the pandemic things would go back to normal—and if they didn’t, the unions would deal with that later. Writing as I am in the midst of this ‘pandemic period’, which continues to stretch beyond recalibrated expectations, it is clear that ‘normal’ is still some way off. Indeed, on 21 December 2021, AEA and SAG-AFTRA announced a six-month extension to their agreement, in the light of ‘the ongoing nature of the pandemic’ and the fact that many theatres in the US, including those on Broadway, still had not reopened (‘Actors’ Equity’ 2021). Even when ‘normality’ finally returns, it seems unlikely that it will be exactly the same post-pandemic as what it was before. Life has been permanently altered by what Zadie Smith has called ‘the global humbling’, and my own sense is that theatre will be too (2020: 6). Major digital change has been taking effect within the theatre industry for more than a decade now, establishing the foundations for a future in which in-person and on-screen theatrical performance exists along a spectrum rather than as a binary. Such a spectrum includes Shakespearean theatre-making while also stretching far beyond it. One thing that looking specifically at Shakespearean work allows, however, is a deeper understanding of how existing art forms, value systems, and the people that make them evolve during a time of extraordinary and even epistemic change.

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6.1 Pandemic Shakespeares: ‘What’s Past Is Prologue’ I started this book by considering three examples of digitally rich Shakespearean performance from the 2010s, each of which took Hamlet as its source text. This trio of productions highlighted many positive aspects of technological innovation in the theatre, including extended audience reach, refreshed engagement with the text, and a probing consideration of what it means to be present. At the same time, they prompted common critiques concerning such work: that its central motivation is commercial, that it empties the life out of a fundamentally live art form, and that it pursues novelty at the cost of all else. This book has shown, I hope, that digital explorations of Shakespeare in performance far exceed the limits of such criticisms, even when overall they might not be deemed a success, whether in artistic, financial, or popular terms. There is virtue in failure and little progress without risk. I want to conclude by looking at three final examples of digital Shakespearean performance, this time created during the pandemic. Like my opening examples, these productions do not tell an easy story of success versus failure, or even of progress over time. The pandemic did not mark the point at which digital performance finally realized the full extent of its long-touted potential, but it did feature an unprecedented number of attempts to make online theatre work. The examples that follow illustrate the diversity of Shakespearean digital theatre-making during that exceptional time, while also drawing attention to three additional principles that future practitioners and scholars may wish to consider: convergence, interaction, and hybridity. In February 2021—on Valentine’s Day, to be exact—Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA) livestreamed Ivo van Hove’s six-hour, media-rich adaptation of Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Roman Tragedies, discussed in Chapter 4. This stream was part of the theatre’s newly created ITALive programme, which in the first instance ran from October 2020 to April 2021 and presented twelve productions on a roughly monthly basis (‘ITALive’ 2021). For e12.50, online audience members around the world could watch multi-camera livestreams of ITA’s work, which cast and crew performed on the theatre’s mainstage in Amsterdam in front of an empty auditorium.

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In many ways, ITALive adopted conventions already familiar from theatre-to-cinema broadcasting, including an insistence on the ephemerality of the live moment, given that on-demand recordings would not be available afterwards. In other ways, however, this project was notably different. In a pre-show interview posted on Instagram about the Roman Tragedies stream, van Hove emphasized how the cameras would change the audience experience: ‘When we started ITALive … we immediately made one important decision—that we were not just going to make a registration of [our productions], but film them’ (@ITA-ensemble 2021, his emphasis). He explained how new details in both the acting and the technical work would become visible to spectators, with the filmic medium interpreting and shaping the performance rather than acting as a neutral lens. While the reality of this statement was not new—as discussed in Chapter 3, the camerawork in theatre broadcasts has long impacted the performances that remote audiences receive—van Hove’s unequivocal acknowledgement of the difference that film makes did mark a break from tradition. So too did the way that the Roman Tragedies stream mixed the live action on stage with the pre-recorded media footage and live-filmed elements that played on the production’s many video monitors. As John Wyver has observed of this broadcast, rather than there being, as is almost always the case with a screen version of a theatre work, the sense of a pre-existing staging being adapted and mediatized in a distinct process for the screen, the stream, with split images from both stage and video mix, felt as if it was a central, entirely integrated element of a singular intermedial project. (Wyver 2022: 35)

This was a livestream that not only recognized but embraced the interpretive powers of the camera and the screen—a feature that was perhaps unsurprising, but no less accomplished, given Roman Tragedies’ longstanding engagement with modern media culture. In line with the way the production has responded to digital and political change since its debut in 2007, the streamed version featured new content, including embedded video footage of the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol Building in the US, a running ticker in between scenes with breaking news stories and audience tweets, and the inclusion of real-life veteran news presenter, Noraly Beyer, who offered summaries of the action in Dutch and English to viewers at home.

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Even more innovative was the way the production started to spread across screens, both during and after the stream. ITA’s social media feeds, and in particular its Instagram page, offered audiences the opportunity to watch and interact with the performance from yet another set of perspectives. Here team members posted behind-the-scenes interviews with cast members, snippets of video of the performance, and polls that allowed spectators to vote on questions like whether their first impressions of characters were favourable or not. Like the social media campaign surrounding The Bridge’s 2019 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, discussed in Chapter 5, this livestream invited audiences to use platforms like Instagram to extend their interaction with the production and contribute to the performance of it in their own small way. In this sense, the Roman Tragedies stream illustrated how theatre might intersect with what the media theorist Henry Jenkins has influentially called ‘convergence culture’—that is, ‘the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want’ (2008: 2). Artists and audiences don’t just relocate performance to a new place—they take it to multiple new places at once. While Jenkins explains convergence culture primarily in terms of popular entertainment and the fandoms it inspires, the Roman Tragedies stream showed that media proliferation can enrich the world of theatrical performance too. The post-live recording of the stream went on to be used as the basis for a televised mini-series in the Netherlands, with one thirty-minute segment broadcast every night for ten days in June 2021. Such a development reflected how theatre is far from a single-platform—much less single-stage—medium. With audiences’ own performances of everyday life criss-crossing through a variety of media channels, it is fitting that digitally savvy productions of Shakespeare find new and inventive ways of doing so too. Three months after the Roman Tragedies stream, in May 2021, a much smaller but no less ambitious theatre company also took Shakespeare across several platforms in its Zoom-based production of Romeo and Juliet , directed by Natasha Rickman. In Chapter 5, I noted how Creation Theatre Company made international news with its April 2020 digital production of The Tempest , which it had co-developed with Big Telly. Over the next fifteen months, Creation staged several more online productions and set up a ‘Digital Repertory Company’ through a

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£165,000 grant from Innovate UK (Gilyeat 2021; ‘Innovate UK’ 2021). One of the productions that this group worked on was an interactive, multi-platform Romeo and Juliet , which invited audiences to choose whether they wanted to be Montagues or Capulets and to see if they could save the young lovers from their tragic fate. Billed as a fusion of ‘live performance, filmed scenes and choose-yourown-adventure style gameplay’, Rickman’s production explored what happened when audiences could make decisions about what they saw and how the story’s plot would progress (‘Romeo and Juliet ’ 2021). The first half took place over two different, live Zoom calls, while the second half relocated audiences to a website where they selected tarot cards linked to actions such as ‘Wait for Romeo’, ‘Open the Door’, and ‘Send the Nurse Away’ (Rycroft 2021: 489). Each choice triggered a different prerecorded scene and a new choice, a pattern that continued until spectators reached the play’s end. In an interview, Rickman revealed that there were one hundred pathways in the production’s ‘multiverse’, including one in which Romeo and Juliet survived (Moses 2021). ‘I wanted to hand the choices over to the audience to play with the idea of freewill versus destiny’, she explained, adding that she hoped the production’s unusual design would make participants ask, ‘“if I was in that situation, what would I do?”’ (ibid.). Such an arrangement located each audience member at the centre of their own version of the production, mirroring, in theory, the sort of individualized, immersive design that has proved so successful for theatre companies like Punchdrunk. But what soon became clear was that interacting with pre-recorded sequences was not at all like interacting with live performers, whether in person or online. As Gemma Kate Allred has written of Mortal Fools, another pre-recorded, lockdown project, edited and pre-recorded videos exist not as a moment captured but as one created … the absence of temporal proximity between actors and audience prevents any sense of liveness, even where the audience is tasked with making decisions and influencing narrative arcs. (2022: 71–2)

In other words, it is difficult for such videos to feel alive in a theatrical context because they lack a sense of real-time interaction between actors and audiences, whether in the moment of viewing or in the past. Though pre-recorded material can be used very powerfully in theatrical productions, as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 with regards to van Hove’s Kings

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of War and Zoë Seaton’s Macbeth, their strength comes from the interplay between them and the live performance that surrounds them. Such a point recalls Mezzocchi’s contention that born-digital theatre should happen in real time, which allows it to retain what he calls theatre’s ‘strongest currency: imagination in the present moment’ (2021). One difficulty with real-time, online performance, however, is that it’s not always easy to tell if it is in fact temporally live. Relayed through a screen, such performance can strike viewers as experientially similar to—and even indistinguishable from—recorded performance, even when actors are performing in real time. A powerful benefit of interaction in digital theatre, then, is in alerting audiences to the fact that the performance is indeed occurring live, for them, in that moment. In this sense, the interactivity is not so much about individual agency, but rather about human involvement and presence. It is a way for audiences to register their presence with the performers and, in some way, to see it reflected back. Pascale Aebischer and Rachael Nicholas have highlighted how Creation’s actors stressed similar issues when discussing their shows: in interviews, they noted ‘a self-evident connection between interaction with the audience and the experience of liveness they also see as central to the theatrical experience’ (2020: 79). The lack of interactive presence in the pre-recorded half of Creation’s Romeo and Juliet is arguably why Benjamin Broadribb saw it as the ‘production’s undoing’ (2022: 502). While audiences had the unusual power to make choices about how the drama would progress, they did not have any sense of others witnessing them do this—or, in the language of contemporary self-care, the feeling of ‘being seen’. More effective were comparatively incidental features of the production that invited audiences to engage with the performance in smaller groups. These included the use of breakout rooms during the Capulet’s ball, which allowed about a dozen spectators to watch a single character perform a speech just for them, as well as QR codes interspersed throughout the pre-recorded videos, which gave audiences access to brief, one-on-one performances with the actors delivered in real time. In such moments, the presence of individual audience members became visible, both to themselves and to the performers, in a more consequential and reciprocal way. Though they couldn’t influence the trajectory of the performance in these scenes, they could see themselves present and acknowledged by others within it. The challenges of facilitating interaction in a way that enlivens shared presence also came to light in what was perhaps the highest-profile and

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certainly the most expensive digital Shakespeare project created during the pandemic: the RSC’s virtual-reality inspired Dream. Performed for a week in March 2021 and powered by the gaming platform Unreal Engine, this thirty-minute, online show was a collaboration between the RSC, the digital art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, Philharmonia Orchestra, and several other arts and research organizations. Though work on the project had begun in 2018 as part of the UK government’s Audience of the Future Challenge—through which the RSC and its partners received nearly £4 million—the pandemic dramatically affected the team’s plans to create a mixed-reality experience that would take place in person as well as online (‘Results of Competition’ 2018; ‘Royal Shakespeare Company’ 2020). With little prospect of the RSC’s physical venue reopening before the end of the Audience of the Future’s funded period, the project team reimagined their work into a fully online production loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Performed live each night in a motion capture studio in Portsmouth, UK, Dream featured a cast of five actors whose movements and voices became the basis of a digitally animated story that played out within the magical forest of Shakespeare’s comedy. This new drama, written by Pippa Hill and directed by Robin McNicholas, centred on the character of Puck (EM Williams), whose nimble avatar was a collection of smooth, grey stones that resembled a wooden artist’s model. As Puck travelled through the forest, audiences who had purchased a £10 ‘interactive’ ticket were invited to flick fireflies—little glowing balls of light—onto Puck’s path to light their way (those who were happy to watch ‘passively’ could do so for free) (‘Live Performance’ 2021).1 In these moments, the production’s interface switched to a splitscreen mode that allowed spectators to use their mouse to drag and release the fireflies, like miniature pinballs, into the digital performance space. Dozens of golden lights rained down on Puck, who glided among them as they made their way through the enchanted forest looking for other faerie spirits. While these interactive sequences were visually very beautiful—‘enormously gorgeous’, in the words of Alexis Soloski—they were not especially powerful in terms of kindling a sense of shared, consequential presence (2021). The theatre critic Susannah Clapp noted that her fireflies had ‘no discernible effect on the action’, while the technology journalist Hilary Lamb described these interactive moments as ‘limited to the extent that they are downright frustrating’ (Clapp 2021; Lamb 2021). With so

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many lights falling at once, it was impossible for audiences to recognize which one originated with them and whether Puck had responded to it in any way. As Lamb explained, ‘any semblance of interaction with the performance must be imagined’ (ibid.). Similar to the second half of Creation’s Romeo and Juliet , Dream allowed audiences to interact with the mechanics—and to an extent the aesthetics—of the production, but it lacked in terms of making them feel interactively connected to other people. What was powerfully affecting about this Dream, however, was the way that it drew audiences’ attention to the deeply hybrid artistry of the performance. Towards the end of the show, which featured a tumultuous storm in its final act, the video feed cut from the digital forest to a livestream of the human actors performing in the motion capture studio. With the virtual world projected on a screen just above them, audiences could watch the actors and avatars move in sync as they carried out this high-tech form of puppetry (Fig. 6.1). Multiple reviewers highlighted this sequence as the show’s most ‘powerful’, ‘fascinating’, and ‘exciting moment’, for both the way it revealed the workings behind the animation and how it foregrounded human effort, virtuosity, and even suffering (Broadribb 2021: 494; Akbar 2021; O’Mahony 2021). For Broadribb, Puck’s line, ‘Help me, for I am weary’, spoke not only to their beleaguered plight at this point in the story, but also to that of Williams ‘the actor’, ‘performing in isolation a year into the pandemic’ (2021: 494). It was a parallel that also applied to the experience of locked-down audience members, who watched the production almost exactly a year after the RSC and so many other institutions dedicated to public congregation had shut their doors indefinitely. Dream in this sense was at once a dirge and a celebration—of what had been lost during the pandemic, but also of the creativity that was possible in spite of it. Through the act of foregrounding its hybridity, it drew audiences’ attention to both the mechanics of the production and their own in-between existence. Such liminality referred most obviously to the specific context of the pandemic, but it also gestured towards the wider, less exceptional, and yet utterly defining experience of performing in a world that is simultaneously virtual and real. By breaking out of the digital frame and revealing the human effort that underwrote its seeming magic, the production invited audiences to reflect on both the wondrous and arduous ways that these forces co-constitute each other in the theatre and in life.

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Fig. 6.1 Puck (EM Williams) in both the digital world and motion capture studio in Dream (2021), directed by Robin McNicholas for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Marshmallow Laser Feast, and other partners (Screenshot)

Together, these three productions suggested the importance of communion in digital theatre, both through real-time interaction among audiences and performers, as in Creation’s Romeo and Juliet , and an invitation to engage in heightened reflection about our shared, complicated existence. While such reflection need not be limited to matters of mediated life, the tools of digital theatre naturally lend themselves to highlighting such issues. Productions like Dream that foreground their own hybridity, rather than attempting to efface it, invite audiences to consider the digital technologies that underwrite their own lives, both as consumers and as creators. Furthermore, those that do so by stretching the location of the performance across multiple platforms, like Roman Tragedies, take advantage of audience behaviours that have developed in an era of media convergence rather than trying to fight against them. Most importantly, they open up the possibility of reaching new audiences by de-territorializing theatre, in both a figurative and literal sense. Digital modes of theatre-making are not free, of course, but overall they remain far more affordable for most audiences than in-person attendance. If embracing hybridity and convergence are two important lessons that pandemic theatre-making can offer future practitioners, then perhaps the

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most valuable insight of all comes with recognizing the central role that human interaction continues to play in this evolving genre of performance. Such interaction can take the shape of performers responding to digitally dispersed audiences in real time, or it can mean facilitating ways for audiences to interact with one another. It can also range from overt participation in the performance to subtler modes of recognition, such as the invitation to turn on cameras at the start and end of online productions or the use of website counters to show how many people are watching a performance together. It can also, perhaps paradoxically, be recorded, as with an as-live broadcast of a stage production that shows an audience responding in what was once real time. In all these cases, such interaction is, at its core, a recognition of shared, reciprocal presence. What comes next is, as ever, uncertain. Arguments about what constitutes theatre—and how institutions, unions, funders, and awards bodies should recognize it—will continue on, perhaps indefinitely. As these theoretical debates unfold, creative practitioners will carry on producing work that explores the possibilities of new technologies and their impact on audiences’ understandings of (a)liveness, narrative, character, affect, and togetherness. Shakespeare’s plays will likely remain a recurrent, though by no means constant, touchstone for such explorations, given their historic embeddedness in so many cultural, educational, and financial value systems. Among seasoned theatre-goers, their familiarity will serve as a counterpoise for more deconstructed and postdramatic efforts, while among newer and especially younger spectators, their reworking into popular and often abbreviated forms will be presented as useful gateway experiences. Recreating Shakespeare will remain a way of doing something new and risky, and something old and trusted, at one and the same time. What the digital work produced in the years leading up to the pandemic has shown is that the impact of new technologies on the stage is fundamentally connected to the impact of these technologies in everyday life. Looking at screens on stage—and looking at stages on screen—can help audiences reflect on what it means to live a life framed by different kinds of camera lenses, shaped by invitations to optimize and interact, and connected to others across geographical distances previously unthinkable. Shakespeare’s presence in such encounters is at once incidental and illuminating: while his plays are not necessary to consider these issues, they can bring a productive strangeness to the discussion. In the years to come, theatre-makers and theatre-goers will no doubt continue to explore how

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the technologies that inform their lives might also illuminate how they understand Shakespeare, and vice versa. In the process, the categories of digital performance set out in this book will likely blur, perhaps to the point of indistinction. Modes of distribution will affect creation, and modes of creation will affect distribution, as practitioners and their audiences puzzle out the ways in which vibrant, meaningful presence arises in an experientially hybrid world.

Note 1. EM Williams is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns; I have done the same for Puck.

Productions Consulted van Hove, Ivo (2021) Roman Tragedies livestream, starring Gijs Scholten van Achat, Hugo Koolschijn, Hans Kesting, and Chris Nietvelt, ITALive from Internationaal Theatre Amsterdam, 14 February. McNicholas, Robin (2021) Dream, starring EM Williams and written by Pippa Hill, Royal Shakespeare Company in collaboration with Marshmallow Laser Feast, Philharmonia Orchestra, and Manchester International Festival, dream. online, 12, 18, 20 March [accessed 18 August 2021]. Rickman, Natasha (2021) Romeo and Juliet, starring Annabelle Terry and Kofi Dennis, Creation Theatre Company, Zoom, 15 May.

Works Cited ‘Actors’ Equity Association, SAG-AFTRA Extend Pandemic Agreement’ (2021) Actors’ Equity, 21 December, https://www.actorsequity.org/news/PR/SAGAFTRACOVIDExtension/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Aebischer, Pascale and Rachael Nicholas (2020) ‘Digital Theatre Transformation: A Case Study and Digital Toolkit’, Creation Theatre, October, https://www. creationtheatre.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Final-full-reportfor-web-reduced-compressed.pdf [accessed 19 August 2021]. ‘Agreement Between Actors’ Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA’ (2020) Actors’ Equity, 14 November, https://actorsequity.org/news/PR/SAGAFT RAAgreement/sag-aftra-agreement-PDF [accessed accessed 15 February 2022].

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Akbar, Arifa (2021) ‘The RSC’s Hi-Tech Dream Opens Up a World of Theatrical Possibility’, The Guardian, 17 March, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/ 2021/mar/17/rsc-a-midsummer-nights-dream [accessed 15 February 2022]. Allred, Gemma Kate (2022) ‘Notions of Liveness in Lockdown Performance’, in Allred, Benjamin Broadribb, and Erin Sullivan (eds) Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation, London: Bloomsbury, 65– 86. Broadribb, Benjamin (2021) ‘Review of Pippa Hill’s Dream’, Shakespeare 17:4, 492–5, https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2021.1950204. Broadribb, Benjamin (2022) ‘Romeo & Juliet ’, Shakespeare Bulletin 39:4, 500–4. Brownlow-Calkin, Rosie (2021) ‘The Jury Is in on Virtual Theatre’, American Theatre, 8 November, https://www.americantheatre.org/2021/11/08/thejury-is-in-on-virtual-theatre/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Clapp, Susannah (2021) ‘Dream Review—The RSC’s Hi-Tech Shakespeare Only Goes So Far’, The Guardian, 21 March, https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2021/mar/21/dream-review-rsc-royal-shakespeare-companynick-cave-the-litten-trees-fuel [accessed 15 February 2022]. Collins-Hughes, Laura (2021) ‘Digital Be Damned! Welcome to Shows You Can Touch and Feel’, The New York Times, 2 June, https://www.nytimes. com/2021/06/02/theater/live-puppet-costumes-blindness.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘The Future of Work Is Hybrid’ (2021) WeWork, 13 April, https://www.wework. com/en-GB/ideas/research-insights/the-future-of-work-is-hybrid [accessed 15 February 2022]. Gilyeat, Dave (2021) ‘Creation Theatre Urges Productions to Embrace Digital Technology’, BBC, 28 July, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxf ordshire-57898939 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Govil, Vivek (2021) ‘The Future of Learning Is Hybrid, So How Do We Make Sure Everyone Benefits?’, FENews, 11 May, https://www.fenews.co.uk/ featured-article/67921-the-future-of-learning-is-hybrid-so-how-do-we-makesure-everyone-benefits [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Innovate UK Funds Our Radical Stage Venture’ (2021) Creation Theatre, https://www.creationtheatre.co.uk/about/innovation/ [accessed 18 August 2021]. @ITA-ensemble (2021) Instagram, 14 February, https://www.instagram.com/ stories/highlights/17925312505515672/ [accessed 18 August 2021]. ‘ITALive’ (2021) Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, https://ita.nl/en/lp/ita live/1440597/ [accessed 18 August 2021]. Jenkins, Henry (2008) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press.

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Jurgenson, Nathan (2011) ‘Digital Dualism Versus Augmented Reality’, Cyborgology, 24 February, https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/ 24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. Lamb, Hilary (2021) ‘Theatre Review: Dream, the Royal Shakespeare Company’, Engineering and Technology, 17 March, https://eandt.theiet.org/content/ articles/2021/03/theatre-review-dream-the-royal-shakespeare-company/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Live Performance and Gaming Technology Come Together’ (2021) Royal Shakespeare Company, https://www.rsc.org.uk/press/releases/live-perfor mance-and-gaming-technology-come-together-to-explore-the-future-for-aud iences-and-live-theatre [accessed 15 February 2022]. Malkani, Dinesh (2021) ‘Going Hybrid: The Future of Work Is Here’, Forbes, 4 June, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/06/ 04/going-hybrid-the-future-of-work-is-here/?sh=50b80af2cb92 [accessed 15 February 2022]. Mezzocchi, Jared (2021) ‘The Technological Theatre Experiments’, HowlRound, 18 February, https://howlround.com/technological-theatre-experi menters [accessed 15 February 2022]. McNulty, Charles (2021) ‘Theaters Hit the One-Year Anniversary of Shutdown’, Los Angeles Times, 2 March, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/ story/2021-03-02/covid-theater-shutdown-anniversary-daniel-fish-cultureclash [accessed 15 February 2022]. Monahan, Sean (2021) ‘Techies Think We’re on the Cusp of a Virtual World Called “The Metaverse”. I’m Skeptical’, The Guardian, 11 August, https:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/10/techies-think-wereon-the-cusp-of-a-virtual-world-called-the-metaverse-im-skeptical [accessed 15 February 2022]. Moses, Caro (2021) ‘Natasha Rickman: Romeo & Juliet ’, This Week London, 23 April, https://thisweeklondon.com/article/natasha-rickmanromeo-juliet/ [accessed 15 February 2022]. O’Mahony, Holly (2021) ‘Dream, RSC Review’, Culture Whisper, 19 March, https://www.culturewhisper.com/r/theatre/dream_rsc_royal_shakes peare_company_virtual_forest/16199 [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Results of Competition: Audience of the Future Demonstrators’ (2018) UKRI: Innovate UK, 10 October, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/gov ernment/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/942163/Compet ition_Results_-_Audience_of_the_Future_Demonstrators.pdf [accessed 15 February 2022]. ‘Romeo and Juliet ’ (2021) Creation Theatre, https://www.creationtheatre.co. uk/shows/romeo-juliet-2021/ [accessed 18 August 2021].

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‘Royal Shakespeare Company Announces 2020 Summer Season’ (2020) Royal Shakespeare Company, https://www.rsc.org.uk/press/releases/royalshakespeare-company-announces-2020-summer-season [accessed 15 February 2022]. Rycroft, Eleanor (2021) ‘Review of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet ’, Shakespeare 17:4, 488–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2021.1950203. Smith, Zadie (2020) Intimations: Six Essays, New York: Penguin. Soloski, Alexis (2021) ‘Living the Dream, on Your Laptop or Phone’, The New York Times, 17 March, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/theater/rev iew-dream-royal-shakespeare-company.html [accessed 15 February 2022]. Wyver, John (2022) ‘The Screen Language of Lockdown: Connection and Choice in Split-Screen Performance’, in Gemma Kate Allred, Benjamin Broadribb, and Erin Sullivan (eds) Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation, London: Bloomsbury, 23–43.

CHAPTER 7

In Practice: Interviews with Two Practitioners

John Wyver is a writer and producer with Illuminations, a production company that specializes in arts documentaries and screen adaptations of performance. He is Director, Screen Productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), where he oversees the company’s Live from Stratford-upon-Avon broadcasting programme and its project to film all the plays included in Shakespeare’s First Folio. I spoke with him on 14 March 2022, the week after his team filmed the RSC’s Much Ado about Nothing for a television broadcast the following month. Erin Sullivan (ES): Thank you, John, for speaking with me today. Could I start by asking you how you got into the business, and art, of filming theatre? John Wyver (JW): When I left university, I was a journalist writing about TV for Time Out magazine. That was just before Channel 4 went on air, which allowed me and a colleague to start an independent production company called Illuminations. In the 90s, I edited a strand of creative documentaries for the BBC, and for one of those I started talking with the theatre director Deborah Warner. Together we made a half-hour film version of Fiona Shaw performing ‘The Wasteland’ (1995), and then a screen version of Deborah’s production of Richard II at the National (1997). On the back of that work, Antony Sher and Gregory Doran asked me for help doing a film version of their production of Macbeth. There was, through the 90s and early 2000s, very little theatre on television. Now © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Sullivan, Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice, Shakespeare in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05763-2_7

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we’re in a relative period of abundance, both on television and on other digital channels, but that wasn’t the case then. Having delivered Macbeth really well for £450,000, which was a snip in television drama terms, Greg and I thought that we had a model for really vivid and immediate filmed theatre, which we could use for other things. We tried to interest television in Greg’s Othello, with Tony as Iago, and then his Antony and Cleopatra, with Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter. But it wasn’t until Greg did Hamlet in 2008, and there was this conjunction of Hamlet , Doctor Who, and David Tennant, that the BBC got excited about our work. ES: How did you get involved in live broadcasting with the RSC after that? JW: Under Michael Boyd [Artistic Director from 2003–13], the RSC as a company had been pretty uninterested in screen versions of their productions. I think Michael still would say that theatre is about the simultaneous co-presence of actor and audience and that screen versions, unless they are completely redone for the screen, are in some form illegitimate. When Greg was appointed Artistic Director of the RSC in 2013, he recognized that NT Live was transforming the landscape and that the RSC had to be in that game as well. He asked me to put together a filming project that could run alongside his plan to stage all of the First Folio plays over what, then, we thought might be six years. We would do multi-camera screen versions of each of those, and we’re nearly at the end of that project now. ES: Met Opera Live in HD came about in 2006, NT Live in 2009. Was this a pivotal time, or was the development of theatre broadcasting more long-term and incremental than people realize? JW: So of course, it was both. It was a significant change, but there were also very strong elements of continuity, stretching back to 1899 with Herbert Beerbohm Tree filming a scene of his King John. Then there was Frank Benson’s Richard III , which was released in 1911 and filmed from the centre of the stalls in the old Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, and then a tradition of theatre on television in the 1930s, with Twelfth Night with Peggy Ashcroft being broadcast live in 1939. What changed, of course, in the 2000s, was that production technology—cameras and so forth—dropped in price. It was no longer solely the preserve of broadcasters and that was crucial. It was now possible, for affordable costs, to hire really high-end, high-definition cameras and audio equipment. Satellite distribution of digital productions was another

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key part. It allowed these productions to be sent directly to the cinema and not depend upon the broadcasters as distribution gatekeepers. By the mid-2000s, the BFI [British Film Institute] had funded a network of digital projectors in cinemas to carry the circulation of art house films and documentaries across Britain. If you put together the availability and access to production technology, the distribution channels through satellite distribution, and digital projection, you then have the possibility of NT Live. So it’s not so much the aesthetic that changes, but actually the framework for production, distribution, and exhibition that was the major change that made possible those theatres’ initiatives. The introduction of digitization was a profound disrupter. ES: You’ve written about ‘the myth of non-mediation’, or the belief that broadcasts transparently ‘relay’ theatrical performance. Nearly a decade into the RSC project, do you think that audiences are more aware of the artistry involved in theatre broadcasting, or is the situation much the same? JW: I think we’re probably still in the same place, essentially, and not just with audiences, but with critics as well. Although there is now a sophisticated academic engagement with this form, there is almost no mainstream critical engagement. Film critics have no interest in it, seeing it as essentially unmediated theatre, and theatre critics are similarly disinterested in it, with one or two exceptions. The language of ‘capture’ suggests a process of non-mediation. It resists the idea that there is a creative adaptive process, and it seems to me that there is little discussion of that in critical writing or, indeed, within the theatre industry pretty much across the board. Does that matter? Well, I think it matters. It would be nice if there was more creative dialogue between those with a skill set on the broadcast side and the theatre practitioners, whether cast members or creative directors, designers, sound design. There is a tendency to think that this process is simple, straightforward, and very easily and—crucially—cheaply done. Of course, it can be. In the simplest terms, you can stick your iPhone up in front of the stage and log into YouTube and you can stream a stage version—if you don’t care about rights, audio quality, or narrativizing the story and enhancing its affect. For me, this thinking fails to acknowledge how significant the adaptation process can be and how it can profoundly enhance the aesthetic achievement of the stage work. And that’s what I and my colleagues are always aiming for.

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Things may be changing a bit as theatre companies and theatre practitioners have, post-lockdown, recognized the significance of taking their work to new audiences through digital forms. One of the things I’m optimistic about is that there will be more creative dialogue and more genuine collaboration between those two sides. ES: I imagine that this lack of dialogue has been frustrating. But has it ever opened up creative opportunities, perhaps because others don’t fully understand or pay proper attention to what you do? JW: At the RSC, the framework has always been that we are deeply respectful of the primacy of the stage work, so one has to be very cautious about reimagining or reinterpreting. Now, maybe that will change, but for now it’s [that framework’s] still grounded in that mythos around what a stage performance is and a belief that the screen interpretation is secondary, perhaps inferior, and not a true partner in the process. When I have worked with theatre creatives who are more engaged with film, and when there has been the budget and time to do it, then what I think begins to open up are new possibilities. That was certainly the case when we were working with Phyllida Lloyd on the Donmar Trilogy (2016), which for me pushed forward what these possibilities are in all sorts of interesting ways. This was also the case working with Robert Icke on the television version of the Almeida’s Hamlet (2018). Rob was really interested in thinking about how this multi-camera form could move towards what might be a more—tricky word—cinematic screen language. ES: There was a lot of excitement about event cinema in the 2010s—the way it was helping theatre and cinemas, the way it might extend audience reach. Do you think event cinema has a future as we come out of the pandemic? JW: It’s probably a bit early to really know. Certainly today audiences are not returning to cinemas to support event cinema in the way they did pre-pandemic. That may be because the demographic is skewed older and those audiences are more cautious about gathering in large numbers in enclosed spaces. It may also be a factor of the greater availability of theatre through YouTube, broadcast television, and other online channels. There is not, perhaps, the same special quality attached to going to the cinema to see this work. That creates difficulties for a business model that, even if it wasn’t exactly comfortable, more or less worked. Previously, large-scale, privileged, public companies, notably the NT and the RSC, could afford to finance or part-finance this work at a high level, with high production

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values, and with pretty reasonable fees and royalty shares to creatives. If event cinema audiences are going to be less than half what they were prepandemic—and I think that’s a figure that could quite possibly be the case—then that no longer works as a business model. ES: What are your thoughts on television broadcasts and livestreams to computers and mobile devices, as opposed to distribution in cinemas? How much of an influence does screen size have on the way you plan your work? JW: If you are making work where the primary place it will be seen is the cinema, then that unquestionably has an impact on the way in which you carry through the adaptation process. When you make work for a large screen, the shots are wider than making work for television and the cutting rate is slower, in really basic terms. You are more interested in spectacle and perhaps the theatricality of it, the sense of being within the theatre. That idea of translating the experience of sitting in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to the experience of sitting in the Clapham Picturehouse [a cinema in London] unquestionably is a key part of what that event cinema process was. If that is not going to be the primary economic driver or form of distribution, then I think that will change the aesthetics and experience of this form. The sense of traditional liveness—near simultaneous experience—will become much less significant. This was already happening pre-pandemic, but we still don’t know how it will play out. There hasn’t been enough time. ES: You mentioned traditional liveness, and the experiences associated with it. How much does that matter to you as a practitioner? JW: To an extent, liveness is about a significant number of people watching something more or less at the same time, and having more or less meaningful exchanges about that, whether on social media or in other forms. The idea that a piece occupies a place for a comparatively large audience—let’s say 200,000 people—who can communicate their engagement, interest, concern, and arguments about it within a defined period, I think that’s important. That’s why, of course, television has always been really important in showing things at the same moment, whether or not they’re live in traditional terms. I think it is one of the things that theatre companies are going to need to reinvent in some way, whether it’s a special premiere with parallel online events, or whether it’s some other way of encouraging people to watch and engage with a work at the same moment. Of course, people will

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want, rights permitting, to access work at different times and in different ways. But there is something about a piece having very real and immediate currency. Television’s done that for a very long time. Theatre on screens is going to need to understand its way of keeping things live for a night, for a week, for three months. ES: To what extent do you try to register elements of the live moment shared by actors and in-person audiences when you’re filming theatre for the screen? JW: I think it depends on the project. It’s much more important with a comedy because the relationship between the actors and the audience is much more vivid and present, usually, than with a tragedy or history play. Both the comedy issue and the issue of filming on a thrust stage are things that we’ve been really engaging with as we film Much Ado about Nothing . For me, two key productions over the past eighteen months are Sonia Freidman’s Uncle Vanya (2020) and the Almeida’s Macbeth (2021). Both of them really tried to find a different way of working in multi-camera, getting much closer and making something much more intimate—something that was perhaps more like the screen grammar of television than cinema. In both cases, you’re working with small-scale, claustrophobic, domestic productions, and in neither case do you have a visible audience. They were able to get the cameras much closer and develop an intimate narrativization that I thought was very successful. That is really hard to do with a large-scale, very exuberant, comic piece on a thrust stage, and that was exactly the focus of a lot of the creative discussions that we were having as we were working on Much Ado. I don’t know how you do that when you want to keep big laughs, and you want to keep, at times, a sense of the actor drawing the audience into their world. Those are some of the aesthetic and adaptive questions that these new developments in the form are raising. ∗ ∗ ∗ Zoë Seaton is the founder and Artistic Director of Big Telly, a theatre company based in Portstewart, North Ireland, that specializes in sitespecific, participatory work. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Ulster for her commitment to the dramatic arts in Northern Ireland, and she cites gaming, escape rooms, and artificial intelligence among her creative influences. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Seaton

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directed internationally celebrated productions of The Tempest , in collaboration with Creation Theatre Company in Oxford, and Macbeth, both of which took place on Zoom. I spoke with her on 30 March 2022. Erin Sullivan (ES): Thank you, Zoë, for speaking with me today. You’ve been making site-specific work with Big Telly for thirty years. Had the company worked much with digital technology before the pandemic, or was it a new phase? Zoë Seaton (ZS): We were interested in tech before the pandemic and had made quite a lot of game theatre. We were looking at other entertainment models, like escape rooms and games, as ways of modelling theatre experiences. We weren’t doing anything entirely online before the pandemic, but we were already making apps and making shows that ran on tech like WhatsApp, so we were already in the world a bit. ES: Did it feel like a natural step, then, when you moved your work fully online in 2020, or was it a challenging transition? ZS: It did feel like a natural step, and it was clear to me that the first piece we should do was The Tempest , because we had just done it as a game in person. We had already gone through the process of turning it into a game—fragmenting the narrative, looking at what happens if an audience has to go and find the play, looking at how the audience is present within each moment. So it felt like a straightforward step to go online with it, although when we did I realized that there were lots of doors that had been closed before, because it was a piece of [in-person] theatre, which we could now reopen. For instance, in the original piece, the audience went around a series of ten scenes, almost like a clock. You couldn’t have the same character in two scenes, whereas online we could have Ariel inform everything. We went back and retraced our steps and made sure we weren’t keeping the restrictions of the piece that we had in the real world. Going online opened up new possibilities. ES: That production of The Tempest was the first time I had ever been on Zoom, much less seen Zoom theatre. Did you have experience of Zoom as a platform before that? ZS: No, none at all. When the pandemic came, we were running six projects, and basically they were all grinding to a halt. We had about twenty actors on the books, and I asked them all, for the very last day, to come to a place called Garvagh, which was a rural community that

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we were working in. We said we’d have a day of isolation theatre—it was the 18th of March—and we put everybody in separate rooms. We were dangling phones out the window, sending people on journeys on phones, trying everything. We were also experimenting with WhatsApp, Skype, and Google Meet, but we hadn’t heard of Zoom. Then, as soon as we went into isolation, I started exploring Zoom, and then we all got together and started workshopping on Zoom. It was seeing speaker view [a viewing mode on Zoom] and knowing that it could control who was speaking that made it suddenly feel very exciting. So about ten of us got on Zoom and just started playing, and then I called Lucy [Askew, Artistic Director of Creation Theatre Company] and said, ‘I think we should do The Tempest on Zoom’, and she said, ‘Yes!’. ES: It’s interesting to know that you were looking at other digital platforms. Were they less useful because you couldn’t control the screen display as much? ZS: Yes. We were experimenting mostly with live WhatsApp calls and groups and stuff like that. We felt that Skype at that stage was a bit clunky. But we didn’t even know what we were going to be making, whether it would be a one-to-one experience or not. I just knew that I had these twenty actors who were all really charismatic and had loads to offer an audience in terms of interaction. It seemed awful to me that an audience wouldn’t have access to that, and that they wouldn’t have access to an audience. ES: As a theatre-maker, what would you say is your mission, and how have digital technologies helped you pursue it? ZS: I’m interested in surprise. Before the pandemic, we did a piece called Game of Phones, where you’re in an auditorium and you get a phone call or a text. We were interested in how you can be in a situation and have something happen that makes you feel in the moment and makes it feel very alive. And that, for me, was getting a text in the theatre from an actor who says, ‘Meet me in the foyer, I’ve got a car waiting and I need you to go and get something’. I’m interested in asking, ‘How do you break format, how do you create surprise, how do you make people feel like it’s exciting and something’s happening live?’. Because it felt to me like an awful lot of live theatre didn’t feel live. It felt rehearsed and repeated. We [Big Telly] get described as creating unfolding situations more than theatre. We put you into a situation where stuff has to be done. It’s about surprise as a tool to make people feel present, to make it feel live.

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ES: Some people feel very strongly that actors and audiences have to be physically co-present for that liveness to occur. What are your thoughts on that? ZS: I think theatre where people are co-present can feel dead, and theatre where people are remote can feel live. And I think they can both feel dead, and both feel alive. So, for me, that element of it doesn’t really matter. The next digital piece we’re making is on a platform similar to Zoom, and at each show one member of the audience will have an actor visit their house, but nobody knows who. So they might arrive at your door. For me, that’s a different thing that will make it feel live. I think liveness is a thing that can happen in any situation—and the same goes for deadness. For me, as an audience member, what’s more important is that I feel present, and that my presence is relevant. I think I was quite bored before lockdown with theatre. The bit that kills me is from when you go in the door to when you go in the auditorium. You know, that bit when you get your tickets, and you’re all standing around. I just always have the feeling that nothing is going to happen, and then you sit down and it’s a thing that, quite often, is great, but also that feels like it’s been repeated many times. I wasn’t happy that there was a pandemic, but the fact that all bets were off, and we could do what we liked—I liked that. I like it when plans change. I think that’s why I like doing site-specific work in ordinary sites. ES: Your Zoom productions of The Tempest and Macbeth were mostly performed live, but with some pre-recorded video sequences mixed in. How do you decide what should be live and what should be filmed? ZS: I don’t know whether I have rules, I just follow my gut and think about what’s got to be an essential journey and therefore a different thing. When we started The Tempest , I said, ‘Do you know what’s great, we’ll be able to have this amazing storm. We’ll be able to get a storm from The Poseidon Adventure, or something like that, and it’ll be incredible’. As soon as I got Sinéad [Owens], our Zoom wizard, to play a placeholder clip for me, I felt a very physical sense that everything had died. And then I asked the actors to play around with acting the storm—show me a storm in your living room. People were throwing leaves and making their cameras spin around, and the sense of storytelling and play felt so alive. The actors’ struggle to be in a shipwreck in their living rooms felt immeasurably richer to me.

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For Macbeth, at that stage in our pandemic journey [autumn 2020] we were all really missing theatres, and we were in a strange world where most places were allowed to open but theatres weren’t. It did feel like theatres were more dangerous than other places, even though there was no logic to that, so I really wanted to make recordings about a theatre space, and its potential to be a crucible of possibility. There’s also a joy with video of working with brilliant composers and visual designers who can make a composite collage image and offer a piece of art, a thing that’s created. It’s a different thing than throwing leaves at myself off shot and having a fan on. They’re different choices, but they both have relevance. I think, ‘Let’s play all the things we can’. ES: I found the video sequence of Lady Macbeth’s death, where she walks across an empty beach and into the ocean, especially moving. Could you tell me a bit more about that scene? ZS: With Lady Macbeth, I wanted to believe that that woman was actually going through it. The naturalism felt right to me, that we would actually have her walking into the sea. I mean, Nicky [Harley, the actor playing Lady Macbeth] doesn’t swim either, so she was scared. I felt that moment needed a different thing. I didn’t want to be reminded that it was an actor pretending to kill themselves. I wanted the beauty of it, and the tragedy of it, to be there, in that space, just her walking into the sea. It was interesting, because Dennis [Herdman], who played Macbeth, had his [‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’] speech that he said while she died. He was really struggling because he had to get a box off his computer and change costume and do something else, and I said, we can record the speech. And he said no, I need to say it, I need to go through it. His need as an actor, to say that, as part of this journey, at the same time as he was taking a cardboard box off his computer and changing costume—I just thought, God, there’s something very interesting about that. Even though I was distracting him with tech, and he was having to be maker and performer at the same time, he still felt he needed to say those words in that moment. ES: What do you think will happen to digital theatre as we come out of the pandemic? Is it here to stay, or was it a temporary adjustment for a particular moment in time? ZS: I think it’s a brand-new art form. And I think, as with any art form, it takes time to figure it out. We did a hybrid piece in the Belfast Festival [in October 2021] called Department Story. We made a massive mistake

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of trying to launch a new digital platform at the same time as launching a new show. We’d only had the [physical] site for two weeks, and we had to rewire it, so it was just colossally ambitious. It felt to me like the digital version of that show wasn’t ready until about ten days after we’d opened, because we hadn’t learned until then what the unique relationship with the online audience was. I think we got there, and we asked some people who saw the show early on to come back, because it was a test bed. There’s a responsibility with digital work to give the online audience a different experience than the live audience. We were trying to learn what is special about the online audience and what makes them feel special. We wanted to make the online audience feel like they had unique agency, and that they had a separate journey from the live audience. I think that’s the ambition with hybrid work. We didn’t know what that journey was at the start, because we hadn’t really given it enough time. What also surprised us was that loads of our normal audience, who would come to see us in Belfast, chose to be online. ES: Was that because of anxiety about the pandemic, or because they were more excited about the online performance? ZS: I don’t really know. I guess it was a mixture of things. We might have made the online sound sexier than the real show. I think initially the real show was way better than the online experience, because we hadn’t devoted enough time to the online before we opened, so a huge lesson was learned there. I think that as long as we treat the digital audience with as much respect as the live audience, and we say it’s a different experience, then I think digital work has massive potential. Where it just feels like a fourth wall experience—I’m not interested in that. We’re still making digital work. We’re making a piece called Granny Jackson’s Dead, which is about how people choose to be memorialized after they die, like in videogames and digital tombstones. I guess I see digital as a box for opportunity, as an exciting playground. When digital theatre feels that it has to do a certain thing, that’s when it gets stuck. It’s just another thing to play with, and to not be too reverential of.

Index

A Abraham, F. Murray, 120 Abrahams, Roger D., 38 Abromavi´c, Marina, 41 Access and accessibility, 2, 5, 9, 11–14, 31, 45, 49–51, 59, 61, 67, 69, 70, 83–85, 90, 98, 99, 124, 130, 159, 166, 175, 186, 188, 189, 196, 197, 209, 211, 218, 227, 230, 232 Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), 209, 210 Adams, Brooke, 181 Adams, Matt, 26, 27 Adaptation, 4, 5, 11, 46, 49, 68, 112, 113, 125, 161, 165, 168, 176, 184, 212, 219, 225, 227, 229 Ader, Clément, 61 Advertising and marketing, 41, 48, 167, 176 Aebischer, Pascale, 15, 16, 46, 49, 52, 73, 77, 82, 97, 119, 131, 144–146, 173, 187, 193, 195, 215 Ajao, David, 92

Akhtar, Ayad, 26 Alienation (in the theatre), 8, 14, 30, 110, 129, 139, 142, 146, 148 Aliveness, 23, 32, 37–39, 48, 51, 52, 60, 63, 71, 96, 98, 140, 147, 214, 215, 219, 232, 233. See also Liveness Allen, Katrina, 190, 191 Allred, Gemma Kate, 214 Almeida Theatre (London), 120, 230 Amateur theatre, 160, 161, 163, 166, 167, 188 Artaud, Antonin, 41 Artificial intelligence (AI), 180, 184, 230 Ashcroft, Peggy, 226 Ashton, Ben, 170 Askew, Lucy, 49, 192, 193, 232 Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), 141 Atkins, Robert, 63 Attention, 16, 23, 24, 29, 38–40, 51, 77, 87, 89, 90, 111, 112, 124, 134, 169, 177, 184, 186, 197, 208

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022 E. Sullivan, Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice, Shakespeare in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05763-2

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INDEX

attention economy, 38 Aucoin, Don, 10 Audience agency, 10, 22, 73, 99, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 174, 182, 214, 215, 235 Audience participation, 14, 15, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 158, 160, 166, 169, 171, 174–176, 178, 182, 185, 186, 189, 190, 192, 197, 212, 213, 219, 230 Audience surveys, 35, 50, 69, 72, 77 Aura, 33, 37, 39, 64. See also Benjamin, Walter Auslander, Philip, 33, 34, 36, 62 Avant-garde theatre, 5, 7, 15, 34, 110–113, 116–120, 139, 140, 149 B Babbage, Charles, 2 Baby boomers, 197 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 37 Ball, III, James R., 124 Balme, Christopher, 34, 35, 61 Banality (digital), 3, 27, 45, 60, 121, 139, 159, 175, 180, 181, 186, 195, 196 Barbican Centre (London), 5–7, 63, 88 Barker, Martin, 12, 15, 38, 66, 69, 72, 77, 94 Barrett, Felix, 22, 39. See also Punchdrunk (London) Barrett, James, 170 Barthes, Roland, 129, 133, 137 punctum, 129, 130 Bass-McFaul, Shalyn, 191 Bay-Cheng, Sarah, 77, 84, 167, 168, 176 Bazalgette, Peter, 67 Bazin, André, 86, 89 Beerbohm Tree, Herbert, 226

Benjamin, Walter, 32, 33, 38, 39, 93, 130 Benko, Tina, 95, 96 Bennett, Susan, 70, 71, 99, 125, 126 Benson, Frank, 226 Berliner Festspiele, 86 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 157, 197 Beyer, Noraly, 212 BFI (British Film Institute) (London), 227 Biggin, Rose May, 179 Big Telly (Northern Ireland), 49, 192–194, 196, 213, 230, 232 Billington, Michael, 6, 59, 67, 134, 142, 144, 145 Blackwell, Anna, 85 Blake, Bill, 26 Bloom, Gina, 15, 163, 165 Board and card games, 160, 162–164 Bolter, Jay, 25 Bonner, Frances, 72, 99, 182 Boxer, Stephen, 91 Boyd, Michael, 226 Branagh, Kenneth, 71, 82, 98 Brantley, Ben, 6, 50, 117, 142 Brecht, Bertoldt, 40, 125 Coriolan, 125 The Bridge Theatre (London), 176, 213 British Council Europe, 175 British Museum (London), 66 Broadribb, Benjamin, 190, 215, 217 Broadway (New York City), 63, 64, 66, 187, 210 Brookes, Mike, 121, 125–127, 129. See also National Theatre Wales (Cardiff) Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) (New York City), 7, 167 Brook, Peter, 24, 64, 98, 159 Brown, Corinna, 191

INDEX

The Builders Association (New York City), 118 Burton, Richard, 63–66, 73, 116, 117 Bushnell, Rebecca W., 15, 178 Byrne, Antony, 74 C Calbi, Maurizio, 171, 173 Calleja, Gordon, 40 Carroll, Tim, 63 Cartelli, Thomas, 7, 9, 15, 22, 112, 140, 149 Castronova, Edward, 165 Cavendish, Dominic, 68, 144, 145, 173 Cheek by Jowl (UK), 30 Chekhov, Anton, 112 Uncle Vanya, 230 Cinemas (digitization), 66, 227 Cinpoe¸s, Nicoleta, 93 Clapp, Susannah, 125, 216 Clark, Roger, 94 Class (social), 159, 161, 162, 167, 189 Close ups, 6, 60, 69, 73, 74, 78, 79, 81–83, 85, 86, 89–91, 94–96, 121, 123, 129–131, 135–138, 194 Clubs and societies (Shakespearean), 160–162 Cobb, Jelani, 138 Cochrane, Bernadette, 72, 99, 182 Coldicutt, Rachel, 67 Collins-Hughes, Laura, 50, 87, 209 Comédie-Française (Paris), 96 Commercialization, 5, 7, 11, 45, 70, 211 Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (Boston), 9, 181, 183, 186 Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit , 9, 10, 30, 31, 181–183

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Community and communion, 1, 14–16, 22–24, 29, 31, 35–39, 44, 45, 50, 51, 158, 160–162, 166, 167, 171, 175, 177, 184–186, 189, 193, 196, 197, 209, 215, 217–219, 229 Complicité (London), 134 Conkie, Rob, 122, 128, 134 Convergence and convergence culture, 15, 41, 211, 213, 218 Cooke, Alan, 96 Coveney, Michael, 92 Covid-19/coronavirus pandemic, 3, 11, 12, 15, 35, 45, 49–52, 60, 70, 72, 97, 98, 159, 166, 184–186, 192, 193, 195, 196, 207–211, 217, 219, 228, 230, 231, 233–235 Craiova Shakespeare Festival (Romania), 187 Creation Theatre Company (Oxford), 49, 192, 213, 217, 231, 232 Crouch, Tim, 135. See also Spymonkey (Brighton) Cultural capital (Shakespearean), 30, 51, 60, 117, 118, 161–163, 165, 167, 187, 219 Cumberbatch, Benedict, 5–7, 9, 11, 30, 63, 93, 98 Curtis, Sophie, 145 Cutmore-Scott, Jack, 181, 183 Cyborgs, 111, 146 D Deconstructionism, 5, 8, 30, 112, 113, 117, 118, 120, 149, 219 Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (UK), 12 Dering, Edward, 161 Devlin, Es, 93 De Vos, Laurens, 121 Dickson, Andrew, 177

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The digital (definition), 14, 26, 27 Digital dualism, 25, 27, 29, 173, 208, 209 Digital poverty, 12, 13 Digital Theatre (online platform), 68 Dinnen, Zara, 27 DiNucci, Darcy, 160 Distribution (digital), 60, 63, 66, 67, 70, 99, 226, 227 Diversity and inclusivity, 6, 12, 159, 188, 189, 196 Dixon, Dan, 179, 180, 196 Dixon, Steve, 111, 178, 182 Dobson, Michael, 160, 161, 163, 167 Domesticity, 97, 190, 194 Donmar Trilogy, 96, 228 Donmar Warehouse (London), 71, 83, 123 Doran, Gregory, 71, 74, 75, 143–147, 169, 172, 225, 226 Dorsen, Annie, 7–9, 11, 30 A Piece of Work, 7–9, 120, 140, 149, 209 DVDs, 27, 64, 72 E Editing, 60, 62, 63, 69, 70, 73, 78, 82–84, 86, 97, 117, 210, 214 Educational curricula (and Shakespeare), 29–31, 60, 161, 219 Eggleston, Paul, 179, 180 Elam, Keir, 36 Electronovision, 63–66, 116, 117, 149 Elevator Repair Group (New York City), 118 Ellis, Sarah, 143, 169, 172 Embodiment, 9, 10, 13, 14, 22, 23, 26, 28, 32, 34, 35, 39–48, 51, 52, 84, 85, 110, 117, 140, 143, 144, 159, 177, 178, 186, 209

Environmental sustainability, 51 Ephemerality, 24, 25, 64, 212 Eroticism, 21, 45, 85, 130 Escape rooms, 230, 231 Etchells, Tim, 87. See also Forced Entertainment (Sheffield) Ethics (in the theatre), 14, 46, 111, 129, 130, 134, 137, 169, 174 Event cinema, 66, 228, 229 Eventness, 37, 61, 229 F Failure (value of), 148, 159, 169, 180, 197, 211 Falassi, Alessandro, 38 Fandoms, 5, 22, 93, 189, 213 Feltham, Jamie, 184, 185 Festivity (theatrical), 38, 63, 176 Film and cinema, 24, 25, 32, 39, 41, 61, 64, 66, 72, 77, 81, 84, 85, 91, 92, 94–96, 98, 116, 126, 128, 129, 133, 140–143, 178, 181, 182, 191, 194, 209, 212, 226, 228, 229. See also video Findlay, Deborah, 84 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 32 Fiveash, Kelly, 144, 145 Floyd, George, 138 Forced Entertainment (Sheffield), 86, 88, 97 Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare, 86, 88 Fortier, Mark, 24, 26 Fortuyn, Pim, 122 Fowler, Benjamin, 140, 142 Frames (theatrical), 70, 72, 81, 92, 99 Freidman, Sonia, 230 Freiss, Stephan, 135 Freud, Emma, 85 Friedman, Michael, 85, 90, 91 Fuchs, Barbara, 187 Funding (theatre), 12, 66, 125, 166

INDEX

Arts Council England, 35, 48, 49, 67 Audience of the Future Challenge, 216 Innovate UK, 214 Nesta, 48, 49, 59, 179 Futurism, 111 G Game theatre, 231 Gardner, Lyn, 5, 6, 93 Garrick Theatre (London), 72 Gatiss, Mark, 84 Gaylord, Karen, 70 Gender, 131, 134, 159, 162, 188–190 #MeToo, 174 Gen X, 197 Gen Z, 189, 197 Gielgud, John, 63, 65, 117 Gimmick (technology as), 5, 10, 11, 99, 186, 211 Godwin, Simon, 97 Goffman, Erving, 25, 168 Google, 9, 172, 177, 181, 183, 198 Gordon, Colette, 45 Gorman, Samantha, 184, 186. See also Tender Claws Grace, Maryam, 190 Grau, Oliver, 41 Greenawalt, Kim, 208 Green, Jesse, 50, 128 Grey, Jess, 178, 186 Grusin, Richard, 25 Gwynne, Nia, 126 H Hamilton, 96, 192 Hamilton, Emma, 75 Haptics, 42, 43, 185, 186 Harewood, David, 95, 96

241

Harley, Nicky, 194, 234 Harris, Elizabeth A., 9, 10, 31, 181 Hartley, Andrew James, 32 Hayes, Kelly, 138 Heidegger, Martin, 28 techn¯e, 28, 34 Hemming, Sarah, 22, 40, 125, 135 Herdman, Dennis, 193, 194, 234 Hiddleston, Tom, 83, 85, 98 Hill-Gibbins, Joe, 130, 131, 133, 134 Hill, Pippa, 216 Hitchcock, Alfred, 21 Hitchings, Henry, 130, 145 Holland, Peter, 161, 166 Hollis, Gavin, 142 Horowitz, Jake, 95 Howard, Jane, 124, 147 Hugo, Victor, 61 Humanism, 116 Hunger (2008), 86 Hybridity, 15, 50, 52, 90–92, 94, 96–98, 172, 208, 211, 217, 218, 220, 234, 235 Hytner, Nicholas, 59, 68, 74, 76, 82, 120, 176

I Icke, Robert, 120, 228 Illuminations, 225 The Imaginarium Studios, 143, 144 IMAX, 41 Immersion, 3, 5, 10, 13–15, 23, 39–43, 45–48, 60, 74, 77, 78, 89, 96, 159, 178–181 Immersive theatre, 21, 22, 31, 40, 44, 45, 178, 181, 182, 214 Improvised theatre, 169, 174 Industrial revolution, 1 Ingham, Michael, 36 Ingram, Emily, 190 Innovation (impact of), 49, 112, 208

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INDEX

Intel, 143, 144, 176 Interaction and interactivity, 4, 15, 22, 26, 32, 36, 37, 40, 41, 43, 47, 51, 99, 160, 165, 171, 173–176, 178, 179, 183–186, 192, 193, 197, 211, 213–219, 232 Intermedial theatre, 14, 15, 34, 35, 46, 109–116, 118–122, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138–142, 147–149, 159, 195, 197, 212 Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA), 123, 211 ITALive, 211, 212 Isherwood, Charles, 8, 9, 91

J Jarvis, Liam, 44 Jenkins, Henry, 213 Jeremiah, Ivanno, 132, 133 Johnson, Boris, 193 Jurgenson, Nathan, 25, 27–29, 208

K Kail, Thomas, 96 Kattenbelt, Chiel, 109, 110 Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company (KBTC) (London), 71, 82 Khan, Iqbal, 91 Killick, Jerry, 87–89 Kinnear, Rory, 74, 76, 82 Kirwan, Peter, 71, 124, 133, 134, 173 Kloska, Joseph, 97 Kodomo Kyojin Theater Company (Osaka), 187 Koolschijn, Hugo, 124 Kurzel, Justin, 6 Kwei-Armah, Kwame, 99

L Lamb, Hilary, 216, 217 Lanier, Jaron, 42–44, 183 Lapotaire, Jane, 74, 75 Laurel, Brenda, 158 Lavender, Andy, 116, 120 Lawal, Lekan, 192 LeCompte, Elizabeth, 112, 117, 118, 141. See also The Wooster Group (New York City) Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 113, 118 Lepage, Robert, 115–119, 127 Elsinore (Elsineur), 115, 116 Lester, Adrian, 68, 120 Levey, Elliot, 84 Levine, Lawrence W., 163 Levy, Jemma Alix, 7, 9 Liedke, Heidi, 194 Lifelessness (technology and), 5, 7, 9, 11, 77, 145, 211 Linden Lab, 166 Lindsay, Nigel, 74 Linnemann, Emily, 112 Live broadcasting, 3, 5, 6, 11, 12, 14, 15, 30, 35, 36, 45, 46, 59–61, 63, 64, 67–70, 72, 75, 77, 81, 82, 85, 90, 92–95, 99, 191, 208, 212, 219, 226, 227, 230 audience demographics, 12, 98, 228 camera and microphone set-up, 73, 79 costs, 63, 64, 66, 73, 87, 98, 227, 228 rights, 227 Liveness, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13–15, 23–25, 31, 32, 33–40, 48, 60, 63, 64, 71, 95, 97, 98, 110, 116, 117, 140, 142, 144–148, 159, 184, 207, 214, 215, 218, 229, 232, 233. See also Aliveness Livestreaming, 11, 12, 35, 86–88, 98, 99, 208, 211–213, 217, 229

INDEX

Lloyd, Phyllida, 96, 228 Lloyd, Robert Langdon, 94 London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, 125, 140 Lonergan, Patrick, 168 Long takes, 86–89 Lough, Robin, 69, 71, 74–76, 79–82, 90–92, 95 Lunt-Fontanne Theatre (New York City), 64, 65 Lynch, Richard, 126

M Machon, Josephine, 40–42, 44 MacIntosh, Joan, 7 Mackay, John, 132 Mafham, Dominic, 79, 80 Mainstream theatre, 34, 48, 110, 119, 120, 187, 196, 208 Maler, Steven, 9–11, 31, 181–183 Mancewicz, Aneta, 15, 34, 118, 121, 134 Marlowe, Christopher Edward II , 131 Marr, Andrew, 63 Marshmallow Laser Feast (London), 216, 218 Martin, Brian, 80 Martinez, Ann M., 45, 83 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab (Cambridge), 179, 180 Massey, Petra, 135 Maurin, Frédéric, 147 Maxwell, Dominic, 144, 145 McAnally, Aonghus Óg, 193 McAnespie, Lucia, 193, 194 McAuley, Gay, 78 McBurney, Simon, 134 McIntyre, Blanche, 45 McNicholas, Robin, 216, 218

243

McQueen, Steve, 86 Media launch, 163, 164 Mendes, Sam, 82, 91 Metropolitan Opera (New York City) Met Opera Live in HD, 59, 226 Mezzocchi, Jared, 207, 208, 215 Millennials, 176, 197 Miranda, Lin-Manuel, 96, 146 Mirren, Helen, 59 Mise-en-scène, 60, 78, 81, 82 Mobile computing, 1, 2, 16, 111, 121 Monahan, Sean, 209 Mortimer, Vicki, 92 Motion capture, 143–145, 216–218 Mudlark, 169, 170 Müller, Heiner, 5, 113, 115 Hamletmachine, 5, 113 Multimedial theatre, 14, 109, 110, 116 Munby, Jonathan, 79, 80, 90 Murphy, Andrew, 161 Murray, Janet H., 158 Muse, John, 174 Music videos, 115 Myles, Rob, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 196. See also The Show Must Go Online (TSMGO) (worldwide)

N Naden, Cathy, 88 The National Theatre (London), 30, 59, 66, 74, 76, 82, 91, 97, 120, 131, 134, 187 NT Live, 11, 30, 35, 45, 59–61, 63, 66, 68–72, 77, 82, 83, 86, 90, 95, 99, 100, 179, 226, 227 NT Live at Home, 72 Olivier Theatre, 83 National Theatre Wales (Cardiff) Coriolan/us , 121, 125–128 Naturalism, 190, 194, 234

244

INDEX

Negga, Ruth, 82 Net diagrams, 191 Nicholas, Rachael, 36, 49, 215 Niederhauser, Matthew, 181, 183 Nietvelt, Chris, 124 Non-linear storytelling, 21, 157, 158, 173, 177 Nye, William, 140 O Oculus, 42, 43 Okpokwasili, Okwui, 94 O’Neill, Stephen, 15, 47 Open Air Theatre (Regent’s Park, London), 63 Osborne, Laurie, 93, 165 Owens, Sinéad, 233 P Page, Regé-Jean, 80 Paratexts (for broadcasts), 71, 72 Park, Toby, 135, 136 Participatory culture, 157, 160–163, 165–167, 172, 173, 176, 197. See also Convergence and convergence culture Patel, Dharmesh, 193, 194 Pearson, Erika, 168 Pearson, Mike, 125–127, 129. See also National Theatre Wales (Cardiff) Pellerin, Ananda, 192 Performance (definition), 23, 24, 29, 32 The Performance Group (New York City), 112, 113 Phelan, Peggy, 24–26, 207 Philharmonia Orchestra (London), 216 Photography, 32, 33, 129, 130, 132–134, 137, 138 Pietrzak-Franger, Monika, 194

Pittoors, Frieda, 122 Police brutality, 137, 138 Political theatre, 110, 119–121, 125, 127–129, 138, 161, 193, 212 Poor theatre, 190 Popular culture, 121, 140, 141, 143, 174, 213, 219 Populist Shakespeare, 161–163 The Poseidon Adventure (1972), 233 Postdramatic theatre, 113, 118, 177, 219 Postmodernism, 5, 120 Prescott, Paul, 4, 141, 189 Presence, 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 13–16, 21–34, 36–40, 44, 46–48, 50–52, 60, 63, 64, 71, 74, 75, 79, 81, 82, 84–86, 89, 98, 122, 127, 140, 144, 145, 148, 149, 158, 159, 176, 177, 179, 180, 185–187, 195, 196, 207, 211, 215, 216, 219, 220, 226, 231–233 Presentness, 71, 207. See also Liveness; Presence Printing press, 1 Privacy (and violations of), 130, 134, 137, 138 Projections (three-dimensional), 3, 143, 208 Prosumer, 160 Proust, Marcel, 61 Pryce, Jonathan, 79, 90, 91 Pryor, Richard, 66 Punchdrunk (London), 31, 39, 40, 44, 180, 182, 184, 185, 214 Sleep No More, 21–23, 31, 37, 44, 45, 178–180, 182, 196 Puppetry, 87, 135, 143, 217 Purcell, Stephen, 35, 63, 71, 92, 93 Pye, Valerie Clayman, 189 Q QR codes, 215

INDEX

Quarshie, Hugh, 91 Quartley, Mark, 143–145 Quinn, Stephen, 68 R Race, 130, 132, 134, 137, 140, 141, 159, 162, 189 Black Lives Matter, 134, 138 racism, 130, 137, 138, 142 Racine, Jean, 112 Phèdre, 59 Radio, 61, 67, 125, 128, 209 Ramos, Clint, 182, 183 Randle, Joanne, 191 Ravenhill, Mark, 140, 141 Recording and reproduction, 24, 25, 32, 33, 36, 38, 77, 90, 93, 99, 116, 117, 215 Rickman, Natasha, 213, 214 Risk, 14, 15, 26, 49, 63, 112, 139, 174, 211, 219 Robertson, Tom, 74, 76 Rogers, Jon, 179, 180 Rose, Frank, 40, 41, 47 Rourke, Josie, 71, 85, 89 Royal Opera House (London), 66 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) (Stratford-upon-Avon), 11, 30, 45, 66, 68, 75, 82, 91, 92, 97, 140, 141, 143, 144, 168, 170, 228 Dream, 192, 216–218 Midsummer Night’s Dreaming , 11, 46, 169, 171–173, 177 Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 74, 78, 229 RSC Live (Live from Stratford-upon-Avon), 68, 69, 71, 72, 95, 97, 225 Such Tweet Sorrow, 46, 168–170, 173, 192, 198 Rubin, Peter, 178, 186

245

Russell Beale, Simon, 82, 143, 144 S Sanders, Julie, 125, 126 Sangaré, Bakary, 97 Sargent, William, 64 Schaubühne (Berlin), 187 Schechner, Richard, 25, 41, 112, 113, 168 Scheil, Katherine West, 162 Schlesinger, Helen, 84 Scholten van Aschat, Gijs, 122 Scott, Andrew, 120 Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), 209, 210 Seaton, Zoë, 15, 49, 188, 192–196, 215, 230 Second Life, 166, 167 Second Life Shakespeare Company (SLSC), 166 Sedgman, Kirsty, 33 Sensory experience, 22, 39–44, 46, 47, 62, 109 Shakespeare’s Globe (London), 30, 63, 71, 80–82, 90 Globe on Screen, 79, 82, 96 Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra, 121, 189, 226 As You Like It , 92 The Comedy of Errors , 100 Coriolanus , 71, 83–85, 89, 94, 95, 98, 121–123, 128, 196 Hamlet , 4–11, 13, 30, 31, 63–66, 82, 83, 93, 98, 100, 110, 113, 115–118, 120, 127, 134, 136, 140, 149, 158, 163, 164, 166, 175, 181, 211, 226, 228 Henry IV , 161 Henry V , 98, 120, 146

246

INDEX

Henry VI , 146–148 Julius Caesar, 68, 121, 123, 128 King John, 226 King Lear, 82, 83, 91, 98, 100, 136, 167 Macbeth, 6, 21, 82, 83, 113, 188–196, 215, 225, 230, 231, 234 Measure for Measure, 130, 133, 134, 137, 138 The Merchant of Venice, 79, 80, 90, 120 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 46, 63, 64, 87, 94, 96, 167, 171, 175, 176, 192, 213, 216 Much Ado about Nothing , 225, 230 Othello, 68, 74–77, 81, 91, 92, 95, 100, 226 Richard II , 63, 69, 71, 74, 75, 78, 81, 225 Richard III , 135, 146, 165, 226 Romeo and Juliet , 46, 72, 97, 169, 174, 175, 213–215, 217, 218 The Taming of the Shrew, 163 The Tempest , 109, 143–146, 176, 184, 185, 192, 213, 231–233 Timon of Athens , 100 Titus Andronicus , 45, 98, 136, 137 Troilus and Cressida, 140–143 Twelfth Night , 166, 226 The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 188 The Winter’s Tale, 72, 88, 97 Sharrock, Beth, 69, 71 Shaw, Fiona, 225 Shepherd, Scott, 7, 116, 117, 141 Sher, Antony, 225 Shot-reverse shots, 74, 84, 86, 193 The Show Must Go Online (TSMGO) (worldwide), 188–193, 196 Silbert, Roxana, 169, 170 Simpson, Natalie, 131

Site-specific theatre, 44, 125, 173, 192, 196, 207, 230, 233 Smartphones, 1, 2, 6, 9, 43, 109, 121, 123, 134, 137, 166, 229, 232 iPhone, 2, 86, 227 Smith, Zadie, 210 Smits, Eelco, 147 Smoke Signals (1998), 141 Social media, 6, 11, 13, 15, 22, 29, 36, 38, 45–47, 124, 158–160, 165–169, 175–177, 186, 197, 208, 229 Facebook, 25, 42, 160, 166, 187 GIFs, 176 Google+, 11, 12, 46, 169–172, 198 Instagram, 25, 29, 124, 160, 166, 175, 176, 212, 213 and politics, 121, 124, 125, 127, 128, 134, 137, 212. See also twenty-four-hour news and self-performance, 168, 171, 172, 176, 197 Snapchat, 25, 176 TikTok, 25, 160 Twitter, 12, 46, 124, 160, 166, 168–171, 174, 188, 198 Vimeo, 187 WhatsApp, 25, 128, 231, 232 YouTube, 9, 10, 25, 49, 97, 160, 173, 181, 182, 187–189, 227, 228 Sokolova, Boika, 93 Soloski, Alexis, 184, 187, 216 Someren, Tim van, 68, 70, 82–85, 89, 94 Sontag, Susan, 81, 132, 137, 138 Sørensen, Birgitte Hjort, 84 Sound and sound design, 7, 22, 41, 42, 47, 61, 69, 71, 110, 125–127, 131, 135, 136, 141, 178, 184, 194

INDEX

Space (in the theatre), 9, 14, 24, 45, 50, 71, 74, 77–79, 81, 83, 98, 191, 194–196, 234 audiences and, 46, 81, 83, 86, 95, 127, 178, 181, 188, 191, 192 zoning in live broadcasts, 81–83, 89 Spectacle and splendour, 14, 29, 73, 85, 110, 139, 143–149, 159, 176, 183, 229 Spectatorship, 16, 46, 60, 77, 78, 81–84, 86, 90, 121, 124, 127, 133, 137, 182 Spencer, Charles, 115 Splendor in the Grass (1961), 141 Spymonkey (Brighton), 134, 135 The Complete Deaths , 134, 135, 138 Sterne, Jonathan, 163 Stern, Tiffany, 72 Stewart, Patrick, 226 Stone, Alison, 69, 73 Stratford Festival (Ontario), 30, 96, 128 Streaming platforms, 5, 30, 72, 210, 228 Surprise, 196, 232 Surround sound, 41 Surveillance, 127, 131, 134 CCTV, 131 Sutherland, Ivan, 42 Sykes, Kimberly, 92 T Taymor, Julie, 94–96, 98 Television, 24, 25, 61–63, 67, 72, 77, 84, 92, 118, 121, 129, 142, 191, 209, 213, 225, 226, 228–230 BBC Four, 63, 71 Big Brother, 121 Channel 4, 225 twenty-four-hour news, 120, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 212

247

Tender Claws, 184, 186 ‘The Under Presents: Tempest’ , 186, 192 Tennant, David, 69, 226 Theatre broadcasting, 97, 129 Theatre (definition), 8, 24, 29, 31, 70 Theatre for a New Audience (New York City), 94, 96, 119 Theatre technology (pre-digital), 15, 23, 34, 109 Theatrofilm, 66, 149 Théâtrophones, 14, 61, 62, 66, 69 Thomas, Alun, 127 Thomas, Billie, 92 Toneelgroep Amsterdam, 120, 121, 123 Touch, 22, 39, 40, 42–44, 47, 183 Transhumanism, 116 Translation, 61, 69 Tresnjak, Darko, 120 Turing machines, 2 Turner, Lyndsey, 5, 7, 9, 93

U Uglow, Tea, 169, 172, 177, 178 Ullyot, Michael, 178 Uncanny, 195 United States Capitol attack (6 January 2021), 212

V Valk, Kate, 142 Vanderham, Joanna, 91 Van Hallgren, Carrie, 208 Vanhoutte, Kurt, 41 Van Hove, Ivo, 120, 122, 123, 127, 129, 146–149, 211, 212. See also Toneelgroep Amsterdam Kings of War, 146, 147, 195, 214

248

INDEX

Roman Tragedies (Romeinse Tragedies), 120, 121, 123, 124, 126, 133, 146, 211–213 Salome, 148 Varla, Zubin, 130, 133 Video, 3, 10, 45, 46, 110–112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 129–131, 133, 136–138, 140–142, 146, 147, 173, 176, 183, 195, 196, 212–214, 234 live feeds, 14, 46, 115, 116, 120–122, 124, 125, 127–132, 135, 138, 146, 147, 195, 208, 212 pre-recorded, 147, 195, 212, 214, 215, 233, 234 Video conferencing, 45, 159, 187, 195–197. See also Zoom Google Meet, 232 Skype, 232 Videogames, 14, 15, 23, 40, 143, 160, 164, 165, 179, 197, 230, 235 Arden, 165 Bioshock, 22 Call of Duty, 173 massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), 165, 167 Resident Evil , 22 single-player, 165 ‘The Under Presents’, 184, 185 Unreal Engine, 216 Xbox, 170, 173 Vinci, Leonardo da, 116 Virtual reality (VR), 9, 10, 40, 42–45, 158, 159, 178, 181–186, 197, 208 Six degrees of freedom (6DoF), 43, 183 Vision mixing, 195

Voyeurism, 123, 127, 128, 131, 134, 137

W Wagner, Richard, 140 Wakefield, Charlotte, 170 Waldmann, Alex, 68 Walter, Harriet, 226 Wardle, Janice, 72 Warner Brothers, 64, 66 Warner, Deborah, 225 War of the Worlds (1938), 173 Waterman, Sarah, 83 Web 2.0, 160, 168 West End (London), 187 Whyman, Erica, 97 Wide shots, 60, 73, 78, 79, 81, 86, 88–90, 92, 94, 194, 229 Williams, EM, 216, 218 Wilson, Robert, 111–115, 117–119 Hamletmachine, 114 Wimmer, Jeffery, 165 Woolf, Virginia, 2 The Wooster Group (New York City), 112, 116–119, 140–143, 149, 187 World Wide Web, 157, 158, 160, 167 Worthen, W. B., 4, 15, 16, 34, 35, 117 Wynants, Nele, 41 Wyndham Goldie, Grace, 62 Wyver, John, 15, 35, 62, 64, 68, 69, 73, 90, 96, 100, 177, 212, 225

Y Young, Hannah, 198 Young Vic Theatre (London), 99, 130, 133, 137 Best Seat in Your House, 99

INDEX

Z Zoom, 29, 49, 159, 187–189, 191–193, 195, 196, 208, 209, 213, 214, 231–233 breakout rooms, 215

gallery view, 191 speaker view, 191, 193, 232 spotlight feature, 194 virtual backgrounds, 190, 194 Zurbrugg, Nicholas, 114, 115

249