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Darren Murphy "You had to be there: The challenge of creating 'presence' in plays without a live audience"

On Monday 16th March 2020 The Society for London Theatre, the industry body representing British theatres, announced that all its members would cease business immediately, in response to Covid-19. Production, where possible, shifted online, but theatre as a live event stopped. Original plays across a variety of digital platforms were hastily created by playwrights facing a new challenge: how could we forge a relationship with an audience with this uneasy hybrid of cinema and theatre, outside of the context of a physical space? And how might this hybrid form evolve?

This paper will explore how for an artform dependent on live performance this threat is existential, but not unprecedented: in Athens, The Festival of Dionysus was affected during the plague of 430-426 BCE, Elizabethan theatres periodically closed for entire seasons, and during the 18-year closure of theatres following the Interregnum of 1642 no new plays were produced. And yet these were all periods of great theatrical foment. What is unprecedented about the current pandemic is the available technology, and how it has been adapted to create new hybrid forms. This paper advances the idea that a similar flowering of new work such as occurred after the Restoration in 1660 is one possible outcome, as much through this hybridisation of forms as through the plays themselves.

This work, still in its infancy, is evolving. As a playwright and academic I will use as a case study my play The Gifts You Gave to the Dark, an online drama written during early lockdown, to explore the technical and aesthetic challenges of creating ‘presence’ online. I’ll unpack the process from inception to broadcast, with a remote cast and director, and critically examine the theoretical underpinnings that frame this hybrid form, and how it might evolve into a reconfiguring of the post-Covid theatrical landscape.