Band 13, Heft 1 - Special Issue: Theatre in the Digital Age / Issue Editors: Dorothee Birke and Anja Hartl

This article thinks about the connection between the digital – in conversation with the analogue and after COVID-19 – and care, and reflects on how “viral theatre” has stayed with audiences and scholars. It explores, first, how the pandemic has changed the way we conceive of the potentials and drawbacks of the digital within performance practices; second, how incorporating (or rejecting) the digital can be a form of care; and, third, what will remain, for audiences and for theatre-makers, after forms of “viral theatre” have receded into the background. After providing an overview of recent societal discourses on resilience within the theatre industry especially in the UK but also with reference to Germany, I use the concept of care, informed by the Care Collective’s Care Manifesto , as a cultural framework to engage with performance. The final part of the paper presents the American playwright Caridad Svich’s recent work as a case study. Svich has been producing theatrical work since the 1990 s and is one of the key practitioners and scholars when it comes to critically assessing the role of the digital within a more accessible theatre space. Stressing the potential of the digital to reflect on practices of care within theatre also post-COVID-19, the article opens up an avenue for further research to ask to what extent the heightened implementation of the digital in the years 2020 to 2022 has invited a turn to the anti-digital in recent performance, turning instead to the instability of spectatorial presence and a renewed attention to the potential for failure and disruptions that unite both the digital and theatre.

Throughout his career, Mike Bartlett has kept an eye on and incorporated the ever-changing development of technology into his plays, especially when they prove to be powerful tools for narrative and character conflicts. Bartlett’s first foray into exploring mediatization’s influence on society occurred in Love, Love, Love (2010), which highlights specific moments of technological advancement over a forty-year period, including the 1967 broadcast of Our World , the first live satellite transmission to be broadcast globally. I frame the seminal Our World through a more contemporary technological and global advancement – Facebook, which upon its initial release had great promise to upend the way we define our global society through its portals of communication. Both Our World and Facebook are watershed moments for our digital mediatized society. Both promise youth culture a new way of viewing the world, as seen through the optimistic view of the play’s main characters, Kenneth and Sandra, to the performance of the Beatles during the show. The remainder of Bartlett’s play highlights how the Edenic assurance of mediatization fails to live up to the idealized global village suggested in Our World by foregrounding technology’s movement from a communal global experience to the lone individual, who compartmentalizes media experiences to a value of one. The promise of technology from the 1960 s has failed to move society forward. Instead, it has separated and disrupted communicative patterns, alienating individuals from face-to-face conversations into face-to-screen isolations.

Metamodernism has increasingly been put forward as the predominant cultural logic of the opening decades of the twenty-first century, shifting away from or beyond the postmodern sensibility of the late twentieth century. This article puts forward the verbatim musical Public Domain , written and performed by Francesca Forristal and Jordan Paul Clarke, as a key example of metamodern theatre. Through close analysis of Public Domain ’s livestreamed run from Southwark Playhouse in January 2021, performed under lockdown restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article demonstrates how Forristal and Clarke, together with director Adam Lenson, achieve metamodernism’s oscillating aesthetic and emphasis on felt experience. I explore how Public Domain utilises the verbatim musical form, their chosen subject matter of social media and online culture, and pandemic performance modes and aesthetics to evince a metamodern sensibility. Specifically, I consider the “depthiness” of Forristal and Clarke’s music, lyrics, and performances, and how this was brought out further through Lenson’s directorial decisions for Public Domain ’s livestreamed run. In doing so, I propose that Public Domain is exemplary in demonstrating the metamodern shift in theatrical aesthetics and online culture as well as providing an important cultural artefact of pandemic performance.

Quiara Alegría Hudes uses digital and analogue media as tools of characterization, communication, and conflict in her Elliot trilogy, most prominently in the Pulitzer Prize-winning second play, Water by the Spoonful (2011). This article combines intermediality and transmediality as theoretical vantage points because they reveal, first, that Hudes does not reduce analogue and digital channels to a simplistic technology-based dichotomy and, second, that she applies a nuanced approach to portraying how characters see themselves and others, how they interact, and how they attempt to resolve conflicts. In addition to illustrating the playwright’s complex use of media in the published plays, the comparative scrutiny of Hudes’s dramatic texts and of set designs for performances fosters an in-depth understanding of the dynamic sociocultural and historical contexts of different media formats, their uses, and their implications. Consequently, the integration of digital and analogue media into these plays and performances offers thought-provoking options for intertwining geographically separate spaces, past and present, the real and the imagined.

This article discusses the 2021 Abbey Theatre production of Marina Carr’s monologue play iGirl , which premiered during the COVID-19 pandemic. The play brings together fictitious and historical voices – mostly female – who speak through its only character, Girl (Olwen Fouéré). Adopting the epic genre, it offers a bleak vision of humanity’s past and future. Catherine Fay’s costume, Sinéad Wallace’s lighting, Joanna Parker’s set and video design (the latter with Daniel Denton) emphasise Carr’s focus on marginalised voices but also add a layer of the digital. While the livestreaming of iGirl ’s only dialogical scene, along with the presence of a secluded desk on stage, evokes the recent lockdown, Fouéré’s otherwise nonmediated rhapsodic performance in the physical space of the theatre serves as a counter experience. Both the pandemic context, with a heightened reliance on technology to facilitate communication, and Carr’s gender politics are implied by the play’s title. While a lower-case “i” followed by an upper-case letter evokes the digital and/or the Internet, the play’s first-person narrative style is emphasised when iGirl is read as “I, Girl.” Attributing several monologues to a contemporary “Girl,” whose voice partly overlaps with that of Carr, this article identifies her as the titular iGirl.

Spoken word theatre appeared on the scene of British poetry performance in the 1990 s. The art form privileges the (hyper-)visibility of the poet-performer where practitioners present their work in their customary style in a long form live show. In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, several previously on-site shows moved to the domain of the digital. In this article, I explore four types of such virtual adaptations by women practitioners with emphasis on performance strategies and the politics of visibility. I then engage in an in-depth analysis of The Geography of Me by UK-based Canadian poet Rose Condo to study the salient features and discontents of digital spoken word theatre and Condo’s use of pre-recorded material. I also examine how this strategy negotiates the expectation of visibility of a gendered body in spoken word theatre. I argue that the use of pre-recorded material helps control the unpredictability of online performance conditions and mitigates the risks associated with performing traumatic narratives.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many theatres and performance groups went digital to evade and confront the lockdown enforced on them and their publics. This article focusses on three anglophone stage works to analyse and compare how they experiment with the digital communication technology Zoom. Richard Nelson’s The Apple Family: A Pandemic Trilogy (2020) as well as Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting for All (2020) and How the Time Goes (2021) are first explored as instances of what Heidi Lucja Liedke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger call “viral theatre” insofar as they thematize how everyday reality changed during the pandemic and also highlight the resilience of their characters or performance personas. Adopting an intermedial approach, the analysis then focusses on how these lockdown works remediate the analogue media combination of the live theatre performance in and through the digital Zoom meeting format. As will be shown, the three works feature radically different aesthetic programmes (realist vs post- and metatheatrical) that affect how each work connects with its potential audience and which role it ascribes to the latter.

This article enquires into the intricacies of digital lockdown theatre. By way of example, I explore #TinyPlayChallenge and Tiny Plays 24/7 by the Dublin-based theatre company Fishamble: The New Play Company. During the lockdown in spring 2020, Fishamble prompted playwrights from Ireland and around the globe to write so-called tiny plays, 600-word plays in English. Out of 470 submitted plays, ten were produced and broadcast round the clock online for one week in summer 2020 as Tiny Plays 24/7 . The experience and experiments of #TinyPlayChallenge serve as a case study to analyse the ways in which the combination of digitalisation and lockdown theatre engendered new artistic realities at times of enforced individual and institutional restraints – and possibly beyond, fostering dramatic innovation and ways of negotiating new theatrical and sociopolitical challenges. These processes of innovation and negotiation take place within marked fields of tension: #TinyPlayChallenge explores spaces of artistic freedom within tight formal boundaries (word limit and thematic prompts) and forms of social participation in environments of isolation (digital watching or reading communities). From an intermedial perspective, the article highlights the formal innovations of theatre during lockdown. Finally, it delineates some of the new social conditions of digital playwriting and reception which might have come to stay.

While theatre-makers have responded to the challenges of staging the Internet in many different ways in the last thirty years, there persists a critical assumption that realism is incapable of representing this aspect of contemporary reality. However, I suggest such a dismissal of realism insists upon a false dichotomy between the “real” and the “virtual” that does not account for the intermeshing of the two in twenty‑first‑century life. I argue that Jasmine Lee‑Jones’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner (Royal Court Theatre, 2019) develops a form of “virtual realism” (Bay‑Cheng) that centres its characters’ subjective experiences as young Black women. While at first, Lee‑Jones’s script and Milli Bhatia’s production maintain “IRL” (In Real Life) and the “Twittersphere” as two distinct worlds with distinct theatrical languages, their eventual convergence suggests the impossibility of separating online activity from life offline. Moreover, the play and the production suggest a powerful analogy between Black feminist activism and theatrical realism as having the potential to imagine a different world, without neglecting critique of the status quo. Ultimately, thinking of seven methods as a realist play, not despite but because of its formal experimentation, productively expands our sense of what realism can do and how it can engage critically with the contemporary world.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant increase in hate crimes against East and South East Asian communities was registered worldwide. In the UK, this surge of racism induced British East and South East Asian (BESEA) theatre directors Jennifer Tang and Anthony Lau to raise awareness about the kinds of discrimination and violence their communities were experiencing by producing WeRNotVirus . A digital performance event which aired on Zoom on 13 and 14 June 2020, WeRNotVirus includes ten short plays, many of which interlace different media and art forms, among them spoken word, song, dance, and animation. This article interrogates WeRNotVirus as an example of viral theatre and analyses how its digital format, performative aesthetics, and political agenda intersect. It demonstrates that WeRNotVirus can be read as a tool of digital activism: (1) to voice anger and frustration at experiencing COVID-19-related racial hate in order to establish public awareness, understanding, and empathy regarding the pain and trauma that racial discrimination can produce and thereby resist it, (2) to establish a spirit of community and support for all those experiencing anti-Asian hate and attacks, and (3) to increase the visibility and representation of BESEA artists in British society.

Framed by theories of Bruno Latour, Elizabeth Grosz, and Una Chaudhuri, the article surveys recent theatre and installation artwork which explores humanity’s enmeshed relationships with terrestrial ecologies that are gaining vital importance in the age of global warming. The selection of works has been guided by their use of innovative digitally augmented embodied aesthetic approaches that reformulate concepts of time, space, and agency in order to advocate an expanded concept of humanity’s existence and performance within terrestrial systems. Intensifying extreme events such as severe fires and floods threaten our lifeworlds at unprecedented scales. To survive, we must fundamentally reshape our understanding of the processes at play and rehearse new forms of addressing them. The article speculates how the innovative aesthetics discussed may be applied to expand our sensorial and cognitive engagement with the enveloping nature of terrestrial agency and its amplifying material performance – shifting from observation of its impact to an immersive exploration of our integrated constitution and dynamic interaction. It investigates how the theatrical medium’s aesthetic strengths (acting within time, embodied performance, and affective co-presence) may be leveraged, and – conversely – how its drawbacks (privileging of the human) could be offset in application to full-body immersive interactive AI-based 3D visualisation. Hence, this article considers how theatrical aesthetics can be applied to develop new, digitally augmented creative methodologies that address fundamental challenges posed by the climate emergency.

While climate crisis is a global phenomenon that has great effect on animal life and biodiversity, there are few examples of anglophone theatre engaging with these issues that represent animals onstage. While using live animals for such means is inadvisable, “animal cyborgs” – representations of animals through technological means – are a dramaturgical device that can be effectively used onstage. In their hybridisations of the human, the animal, and technology, they question and pose possible reconfigurations of the normative relations between these three elements. Drawing on the work of Ursula K. Heise and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, I argue that the animal cyborg is a potent yet underused figure in climate crisis theatre and, when it is used, it is often undermined by “immediacy.” This cultural style, based on confessionalism and a removal of mediation, diverts audience attention away from global issues or interconnected concerns due to its emphasis on individuality. Exploring three recent productions – Miranda Rose Hall and Katie Mitchell’s Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction (2023), Complicité and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2022), and Complicité and Crystal Pite’s Figures in Extinction [1.0] (2022) –, I analyse their various uses of the animal cyborg to communicate climate crisis issues and draw conclusions as to how best to use this symbol.