Streamed theatre: Thank you but … goodbye?
The underground pleasures of streamed plays become elusive as the world reopens.
“Hey, did you miss me?” asks a man with deranged enthusiasm, texting me an absurd video message.
This stranger, Isaac, is leaving me one difficult puzzle to solve each day. I haven’t come up with any good answers so far. One day, while sitting outside a lively café, enjoying its return after a long lockdown, my phone buzzes and I click on a recording from him describing a private scene where an unknown individual had sent a very personal voice-note. “But if you knew that, I would be forced to ask how you knew that, ya perv,” says Isaac.
Isaac is a character from a play that isn’t able to exist within the pandemic restrictions. Where Sat the Lovers (WSTL), the mysterious new play from Malaprop, was scheduled to premiere at Carlow Arts Festival. Instead, this companion production WSTL: Epistles is a glimpse into the play’s world, in the form of a series of messages sent to your phone for one week. I hear an alert and there’s Isaac, asking me to guess links between random images and song lyrics. I scan the messages once every few hours, when I’m not distracted by the rediscovered freedoms of a world reopening.
On some level, to write art criticism you have to enjoy decrypting coded messages. Back in 1819, Italian playwright Alessandro Manzoni wrote: “Any work of art contains within it the elements necessary to enable anyone wishing to do so to form an opinion on it”. In the migration of plays to the internet, I found you could still do the job of figuring out what artists are trying to do. What was difficult was grappling with the change of frequency, the plays no longer coming at you with the sharp electrifying clarity of being in-person with their audiences but through a channel that is staticky and less clear, like listening to a submarine-radio miles below sea level.
Watching a streamed play alone at home reminded me of a badly produced pop song where the bass and drums are washed out, leaving the vocals unsupported. Yet, it felt plausible to treat that blurry vocal as meaningful, as possibly the sound of our current moment. Not everyone embraced this. (Our own Fintan O’Toole gave up 10 minutes into Hamilton on Disney+). Besides, to go along with the idea of theatre as existing online and sometimes pre-recorded was to compartmentalise previously held beliefs and even betray them. Theatre is live. Theatre is experienced in a room with others. To devoted fans, it could be considered sacrilege to convert to a different understanding.
For those interested in the medium’s adaption to survive, however, there were fascinating developments. In January, the New York Times critic Alexis Soloski won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, in particular for the essay “There’s No Place Like Home (Theater),” a dizzying account of immersive plays Soloski attempted from inside her home – in her kitchen, her bathtub. Plays experienced through phone, SMS and video conferencing were not necessarily new, and had been side-lined to the margins of fringe festivals for years, but now these became the primary delivery systems for the medium.
While paying attention to the step-by-step progressions this past year – the added urgency when plays undertook live broadcasts rather than pre-recordings; the re-established connections brought on by one-on-one theatre – I had wondered if a previous version of all this had happened before.
The 1920s, the period which heralded the wild literary modernism of Ulysses and Mainie Jellet’s controversial cubist paintings in Ireland, coincidentally saw major changes to the theatre industry, an embrace of bold new genres, and an import of new play structures from Germany and the United States as well as contemporary staging techniques from London. The fragmentary, existentialist obsessions of the avant-garde were well-equipped for wandering the smoky cultural wasteland left after wars at home and abroad, but I had begun to rethink the period in light of the influenza pandemic ended in 1920, and how a pathological threat could also have triggered the next stage in the evolution of artforms.
It felt important to remain open to what “theatre” can be during the crisis. Last year, I sat down at my kitchen table to participate in Binge, a gleeful interactive performance from California’s La Jolla Playhouse, presented by Cork Midsummer Festival. A wild-haired man dressed in a robe asked about my life, listened to me talk about how I miss my co-workers since I’ve began working remotely, and then recommended a binge-watch of Sex and the City in order to feel better.
Elsewhere, I saw myself in the stalls for To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), Dead Centre and Dublin Theatre Festival’s excellent streamed play about a real-life community of futurist entrepreneurs devoted to enhancing their bodies through technology. The play’s own ingenuity involved manifesting its audience’s faces onto iPads in an empty auditorium, an eerily dystopian sight but I was left moved. I missed sitting in a theatre with people.
Those plays couldn’t shake the question of how this kind of theatre remains apart from the rest of streaming media but their involvement of the audience held a clue. In the last decade, immersive plays have been something of theatre’s poison chalice – offering either a respectful intimacy with a play’s subject, or a rabbit hole for our narcissistic temptation to get in on the action. Ironically, in a streamed world it was possibly the most distinctive genre of the medium.
The slate of immersive plays which Soloski wrote about in April 2020, one month into the pandemic, point to an infrastructure already in place in the U.S. but there didn’t seem to be many major players in the field over here. The combined, skilful programming of Carlow Arts Festival, Cork Midsummer Festival and Project Arts Centre delivered a wave of streamed plays last month which had audiences attempt immersive performances. It was also a period where other important developments were difficult to push from people’s minds, such as the long-anticipated reopening of public life, and the uplifting return of in-person theatre.
One of those streamed productions was Swan Lake – The Game, a reimagined version of the classical ballet by Dutch-based dance company Club Guy & Roni, programmed as part of Carlow Arts Festival. Presented with a video game-style interface, I was given options to click through a title screen and select a dancer as my avatar. If Tchaikovsky’s ballet has a fairy tale-like structure, choreographer Roni Haver’s reimagining is preoccupied with darker, apocalyptic concerns as, over the course of levels that take me through an abandoned fairground and a frozen-over lake, I encounter dance solos which bring bleak catastrophes into focus, such as a capitalist stranglehold on a planet’s resources and the destruction of the climate. To navigate the production is to go further into its doomy ambience but, with little difficulty or problem-solving calculated as part of its algorithm, the video-game aspect does not flow. It comes across more like game design being used as flashy scenography.
At one point, the production gives me a psychological test to complete and I rapidly choose between associative images. In a hurry, or possibly through subconscious impulse, I instantly select a photograph of a theatre auditorium, not fully noticing that the alternative option was an image of a laptop. “You are an adventurous swan,” the quiz concludes. Funnily, it’s not the only streamed play that gives me a psychometric evaluation.
A few weeks later I’m on a video call as part of TM, the new offering by Belgian outfit Ontrorend Goed, co-presented by Cork Midsummer Festival and Project Arts Centre. A cryptically blank woman is on my screen, interviewing me for a position in a secret organisation called TM – the kind of company which prides itself on being vaguely global and innovative, not to mention having a thorough recruitment process. “Have you ever murdered someone?” asks my interviewer.
In the past, Ontrorend Goed’s immersive plays pulled audiences into their surrealist, uneasy dreams, leading you down a suspiciously blindfolded path into intimacy in The Smile Off Your Face, or using the thrill of a casino game to replicate a reckless crash into economic recession in £¥€$ (LIES). Given that, I was expecting TM to be revealed as a kind of dangerous, illuminati-like organisation but it turns out it stands for all that is decent in the world. At the end of the questionnaire, I’m told I’m not as evil as I thought I was.
That those streamed plays chose to immerse their audiences in dramas that were ultimately optimistic is certainly one way to read the room, at a time when the world seems full of danger, but the outcome of being left with a personality trait – whether “good” or “adventurous” – wasn’t as moving as other plays which were less calculated in their approach, which cast you not as a citizen in a divided world but let you be yourself: locked down, worried, wishing you could escape into your old life.
Another play with a near-infinite set of concerns about global disasters was Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls In Tehran, co-presented by Cork Midsummer Festival & Project Arts Centre. Manchester-based playwright Javaad Alipoor’s previous plays have sent audiences WhatsApp messages while sitting in their seats, combining SMS and live performance into a hybrid form of storytelling, so a play partially staged on audiences’ phones while they’re at home seems right up Alipoor’s alley.
Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls In Tehran has its audience scroll Instagram posts to uncover events that led to a woeful tragedy involving an Iranian revolutionary hero’s son and his secret lover. Set among that country’s wealthy elite, a world of un-ceilinged wealth is shown to us through decadent images - we even find footage of Robert Mugabe’s son destroying a £45k watch with a bottle of Bollinger. While the link made between the social media app and the aristocrat paintings of centuries’ past is full of intrigue, the Instagram-scrolls as a progression felt passive, un-propelling: a play where the details aren’t essential but selectable, as if in a newsfeed.
While I continued to pay attention, there was a sense of environmental changes having an impact, affecting the thermodynamics of how streamed plays landed. At the opening performance of Swan Lake – The Game, I wasn’t watching from my kitchen table. I was in a hotel room, making a long-awaited escape from an apartment that had grown to feel like an office cubicle. As I carried out the familiar routine of clearing the desk, unpacking my laptop and checking the battery before showtime, the ritual I took seriously for one year suddenly felt kind of absurd, especially against the energetic bustle of people and traffic outside the window.
The metropolis was whirling again, sending takeaway pints to the parks, filling with chatter from outside cafés, swinging back open art gallery doors. Somehow, it made the argument that a play can exist inside my computer seem weaker.
Perhaps the pleasures of streamed theatre were best understood as underground, plays that made up a kind of resistance during an oppressive period. In contrast to the distractable June evenings in front of the laptop, I have fonder memories from the freezing December nights I listened to episodes of The Snow Queen, and how BrokenCrow’s bright, compassionate audio play version of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, impressively full of ingenuity (it mailed painstakingly illustrated messages through its listeners’ postboxes), felt like a hopeful light in a seemingly eternal lockdown. When the odds felt impossible, the play will find its way to you.
Who knows what presence streamed theatre will have once in-person plays return, if the genre will grow in popularity? It will never compete with the latter’s centuries-long bodily presence but, with this period being its proof of concept, streamed theatre might occupy a new, different sphere.
My phone buzzes and it’s another message from WSTL: Epistles, revealing the true identity of my correspondent Isaac. It’s a revelation so surprising, it would probably look fantastic on a stage. Instead, I’m holding my phone in my hand, thrilled by the possible formations and meanings that this will bring. The message does the same thing to my brain you want a clever scene onstage to do.