Part III - ‘Invisible’ Technology and ‘Liveness’ in Digital Theatre Broadcasting

Summary

The broadcast of the RSC’s 2016 Tempest, I have suggested, transformed a production which had in the theatre produced exhilarating effects of spectatorial jouissance, triggered by technological glitching, sensory stimuli, challenging sightlines and double event aesthetics, into a product that invited a calmer sense of aesthetic contemplation and spectatorial plenitude. For remote viewers, I argued, the dominant experience was one of plaisir at the display of magic illusionism and the ability of the broadcast to offer a sense of continuity with the live production and, beyond that, with the intertheatrical network of influences that linked it all the way back to Shakespeare’s own technological innovation. In effect, this suggests that theatre broadcasting, as Phelan suggested, drives a technological wedge between performers and spectators that locks both parties into a locus mode which precludes interaction and response-ability and, therefore, responsibility. My purpose in this final part of the book is to unpick and complicate this wholesale assessment. By scrutinising the technological process of theatre broadcasting, paying close attention to its incorporation of cognitive prompts and examining how broadcasting can work in conjunction with social media, I will show how broadcasts may nevertheless incorporate ‘obscene’ dynamics that require spectatorial engagement and cognitive labour which can, in some cases, lead to platea-type engagements that go to the heart of the ethical dilemmas explored by the remediated early modern plays.