• 1 Susan Brock, Vicente Fores, and Thomas Clayton, ed., Shakespeare and the Mediterranean: The Selecte (...)
• 2 Timothy Billings, “Caterwauling Cataians: The Genealogy of a Gloss”, Shakespeare Quarterly 54.1, Sp (...)
• 3 Elizabeth Pentland, “‘I cannot speak your England’: French women in King John and Henry V”, Early M (...)

1Elements of world cultures inform Shakespeare’s plays, and those plays have subsequently been translated and performed in many languages. Characters from the Mediterranean,1 Cataian (Cathay),2 France,3 Vienna, and Venice play a key role in the tragedies, comedies, and even in the history plays that focus on the question of English identity. Modern actors bring their own racial and gender identities to such characters as Catherine in Henry V and Aaron in Titus Andronicus, and audiences bring their own worldviews to these performances. Shakespeare adaptations are therefore closely associated with global studies.

• 4 Dennis Kennedy, ed., Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, Cambridge, Cambridge University (...)
• 5 Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and (...)

2The first phase of sustained study of Shakespeare, world cultures, and globalization unfolded over the past few decades where transnational power dynamics are brought to bear on Shakespeare’s afterlife.4 The current, second phase of global studies is challenging fixed notions of cultural authenticity.5 Recent adaptations reflect the fact that the transnational cultural flows go beyond the scope of geopolitical divisions of nation-states and cultural profiling.

• 6 Bryan S. Turner and Robert Holton, “Theories of Globalization: Issues and Origins”, The Routledge I (...)

6The multiplicity of the plural term “global performances” helps us push back against deceivingly harmonious images of Shakespeare’s ubiquitous presence. However, there remains the challenge of collation of empirical data. Globalization is difficult to study empirically when “evidence is far better organized on a national rather than cross-border basis.”6 I will demonstrate fruitful application of global studies methods to Shakespeare studies through three critical tools: global penumbra, site-specific epistemologies, and digital performance studies in the era of the global pandemic of COVID-19.

• 7 Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film, Harlow, UK, Pearson, 2005, p. 10.

7The first tool we use for analysis, the notion of penumbra, brings a global studies method to Shakespeare studies. Several adaptations I examine share important themes in common even though they seem to bear different cultural coordinates at first blush. They form a global penumbra of multiple cultural texts as they evoke discrete plot elements of Shakespeare and culturally-specific themes. When light is shed over an opaque object, it casts a shadow with a partially shaded outer region. Judith Buchanan theorizes that in this manner adaptations contain a “textual penumbra,” a body of extra-textual information that is closely associated with the adaptations and that enriches the meanings of the adaptations.7 An innocuous penumbra could be audiences’ awareness of previous works by the artist. A more intrusive penumbra could be directors’ statements on record or the significance of the venue. These examples are chosen to demonstrate how methods of global studies – such as cultural analysis – can further our understanding of site-specific meanings of Shakespeare today. Case studies on the following pages explore the ways in which contrasting forms of somatic and linguistic embodiment enrich the relationships between Shakespeare and global studies. Some of these examples bill themselves as Shakespearean adaptations, while others do not advertise any clear artistic relationship with Shakespeare.

• 8 Quoted in Stephen Kinzer, “Theater: HamletIRAN”, PBS Frontline, April 10, 2011, accessible online a (...)

8Belonging to the first type – works that acknowledge Shakespeare’s plays as their sources – is HamletIRAN. Set in modern Iran, HamletIRAN (dir. Mahmood Karimi-Hakak, 2011) takes place around a pool, the centerpiece in traditional Persian gardens. Despite her ardent wish to set things right, the tormented heroine does not act rashly for fear her country may fall into chaos. Under an image of Mount Damavand, courtiers in turbans scheme while other characters sing Persian folk songs. Something is rotten in the country where the Green Movement arose in the wake of voting fraud that led to the 2009 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The global penumbra around this adaptation evokes Iranian politics and the metaphor of a corrupt court in Hamlet. The Iranian-American director said that he cast women in most of the roles to highlight the need of “freedom for all Iranians” and Iranian women’s contribution to the “struggle against the regime.”8 Ironically, even though the play is set in modern Iran, it was staged at Siena College in Albany, New York, rather than Iran, due to censorship. The production’s poster (figure 1) alludes to censorship and the unspeakable by showing a black skull with green tapes crossing over its mouth. The eye glasses worn by the figure evokes soldiers’ gas masks. The green glasses further evoke those in night vision binoculars on the battlefield. A sword, shaped like a cross and dripping with blood, penetrates the top of the skull, reaching all the way to the nose. Ultimately, this is a political play – a piece of “floating” Iranian Shakespeare – made in the U.S. for American audiences.

• 9 Kaidia Pickles, “TIFF 2017 Women Directors: Meet Bornila Chatterjee”, Women and Hollywood, Septembe (...)

10The backdrop of the Indian wedding is, in director Chatterjee’s words, “inherently dramatic,” because weddings in general force “a whole bunch of people to come together for a certain number of days.” In this particular film, the wedding “brings out the worst in people.”9 Similar to HamletIRAN, this film situates itself within a penumbra of Shakespearean and contemporary politics. Audiences with differing cultural backgrounds may focus more, or less, on various parts of the penumbra. The riveting feature film comes from one of India’s rising female directors who stands at the cross-roads of cultural influences. The cast is Indian (including Life of Pi’s Suraj Sharma), but the director’s approach to story-telling fuses elements from multiple traditions. The film is a co-production between Film London and India’s Cinestaan. With a BFA in film from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Chatterjee was named a fellow of the Sundance Institute/Mumbai Mantra Screenwriters Lab in 2014. Both HamletIRAN and The Hungry, as recent examples of global Shakespeare, are created by directors with American training or artistic association.

• 10 Kathleen McLuskie, “Afterword,” Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the O (...)
• 11 Katherine Hennessey, Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula, Global Shakespeares series, ed. Alexa Al (...)

11The second type of works – those with what Kathleen McLuskie calls “attenuated” references to Shakespeare – include the Saudi film Barakah Meets Barakah and the French film Ophélia.10 While HamletIRAN exemplifies political theatre, other Middle Eastern works eschew politics and even downplay their allusions to Shakespeare. Barakah Meets Barakah (Baraka Yua’abil Baraka, dir. Mahmoud Sabbagh), a rare romantic comedy film from Saudi Arabia, structures its love story around Hamlet’s tentative relationship with Ophelia, but the attenuated allusions are notable only to those who are familiar with Hamlet.11 The film portrays the relationship between Barakah (Hisham Fageeh), a middle-class bureaucrat, and Barakah (Fatima Al Banawi), a feminist fashion vlogger. The pair struggles against strict conventions of their society. The male Barakah is shown living a rather dull life issuing citations of minor offences as he walks around Jeddah, while the female Barakah has a livelier personality.

• 12 Idem, p. 306-307.

13Finally onstage, Barakah plays the “mad” Ophelia stiffly in a monotone: “They bore him barefaced on the bier, and in his grave rain’d many a tear.” The scene serves both as comic relief and a sober reminder of Saudi law that prohibits women from performing with men. The camera – with a frontal shot with deep focus – follows Barakah as he moves laterally on a small stage handing out flowers, telling an off-camera audience: “That’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.” Improvising and interspersing the otherwise stylized lines with modern language, he continues stage right: “And you, take this, I would give you some violets, but they withered all when he died.” Barakah, inspired by his involvement in theatre, has a dream in which he plays Hamlet alongside his lover who plays Ophelia. Whereas HamletIRAN and The Hungry are designed and billed as adaptations of Shakespeare, Barakah Meets Barakah has not been recognized even as having any relationship to Hamlet, and has not circulated widely outside Saudi Arabia.12

• 13 D. A. Miller, “In Memoriam: The French Hitchcock”, Film Quarterly 64.2, Winter 2010, 14-18.

18Other attenuated references to Shakespeare are more visually apparent, though they remain marginal to the main narratives. Teasing audience’s expectations, Claude Chabrol’s Ophélia (Boreal Film, 1963) names its Shakespearean precedence in its title only to erase Hamlet and Ophelia. In contrast to HamletIRAN, this film has a cursory, and oftentimes evasive, relationship to Shakespeare. This is not a re-telling of Ophelia’s or Hamlet’s story. Family takes on sinister meanings of oppression in French postwar cinema. Similar to The Hungry, “family” is framed as an oppressive structure in Ophélia. Nouvelle vague (New Wave) film director Claude Chabrol, who is known as “the French Hitchcock,”13 comments on France’s identity and economic crisis in this film. In contrast to his Les Bonnes femmes (1960) which depicts female sexuality through the misadventures of four young women in Paris, Ophélia – despite its title – focuses on the son of a factory owning family, Yvan Lesurf (played by André Jocelyn). Ever so self-indulgent, Yvan wanders the mansion and its grounds reciting poetry. When he stumbles upon Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film version of Hamlet in a local cinema, Yvan sets out to become a Hamlet himself – parallel to how James Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister embody select aspects of Hamlet.

• 14 Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema, 2^nd edition, Madison, University of Wisco (...)
• 15 Kaara Peterson, “Framing Ophelia: Representation and the Pictorial Tradition”, Mosaic: An Interdisc (...)

19In the scene with the most sustained reference to Shakespeare, a small crowd is shown gathering outside a theatre with enthusiasm about Olivier’s “love story” before the camera zooms in to linger, for an extended sequence, on various stills of Olivier’s film (figure 6). Yvan walks past the crowd and meditates briefly about his own life in front of Olivier’s poster, but does not step into the theatre. As he strolls along, a dialogue, dubbed in French, from Olivier’s film is heard (figure 7). The dialogue and the visuals serve as mise en abyme as well as an inner voice of Yvan. A typical protagonist of the New Wave cinema, Yvan is a “spontaneous young character” depicted in Chabrol’s “unpolished […] film style.”14 Ironically, Yvan’s arc marginalizes the tangential story of a woman who says repeatedly “Je ne suis pas Ophélia. Je suis Lucy.” There is no plot parallel between Lucy’s story and that of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. The name Ophelia becomes a “free-floating apostrophe” in Chabrol’s film, because the narrative refers repeatedly to the state of not being Ophelia.15

• 16 Alan Millar, Adrian Haddock, and Duncan Pritchard, Introduction, Epistemic Value, ed. Adrian Haddoc (...)

21The second tool we will use, therefore, is site-specific analysis. Site-specific epistemologies consist of the production and dissemination of location-based meanings, as “epistemic evaluation” depends on “practical concerns” such as the cultural backgrounds of the artists and audiences.16 In the ethnographic sense, the setting (mise-en-scène) and venue of performances are key to location-specific narratives and knowledge.

• 17 Alexa Alice Joubin, Shakespeare and East Asia, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021, 26-32.

23Site-specific ideologies also manifest themselves through censorship of or local aversion to particular plays. Hamlet and other tragedies were banned by Joseph Stalin in 1935 when he declared that life could only be joyful in the communist state, and Japanese censors banned Hamlet in the 1930s on the ground of its potential to incite resurgence against the country’s rightist government.17

• 18 Archives et Musée de la Littérature, Aspasia: L’Annuaire du spectacle, Bibliothèque Royale, accessi (...)
• 19 A. José Axelrad, “Shakespeare’s Impact Today in France”, Shakespeare Survey 16, 3-56; see p. 56; “L (...)

24Henry V, for instance, had never been staged professionally in the French language at a major venue in France until 1999, according to Philippe Torreton. This is significant when we consider that there is a long history of French engagement with Shakespeare, including all three parts of Henry VI. If we expand the scope to Francophone countries and smaller venues, there were two productions of this play earlier. There was a production of Henry V in French by Rideau de Bruxelles (directed by Claude Étienne) at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Belgium, in 1953,18 and the Comédie de l’Ouest seemed to have mounted a production in Rennes, France, in 1962. For the latter, neither of the two extant sources names the director, which is a sign of its historical obscurity.19

• 20 Philippe Torreton, Thank you, Shakespeare!, Paris, Flammarion, 2016, p. 117-118.
• 21 Florence March, “The Problematic Reception of Henry V in France: A Case Study”, in Sujata Iyengar a (...)

25As renowned actor Philippe Torreton (recipient of l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) puts it, French producers cannot imagine “Napoleon being invited to attend a representation of this triumphal English epic in the land of France,”20 especially its portrayal of the French humiliation during the Battle of Agincourt. However, in the post-Brexit context, Henry V is gaining traction as it evolves from “a patriotic, partisan drama” into “one of healing and reconciliation.”21

• 22 Torreton, op. cit., p. 118.

26When Torreton starred in Jean-Louis Benoit’s 1999 La Vie du Roi Henri V in the prestigious venue of the Honour Court of the Palais des Papes during the Festival d’Avignon, he rejoiced at the absence of French predecessors. He wrote: “there is no one between Shakespeare and me, four hundred years since 1599,”22 alluding to actors’ typical struggle to differentiate themselves from previous performances of the same roles.

• 23 Delphine Lemonnier, “Rencontre autour d’Henri V: Philippe Torreton et Jean-Louis Benoit”, Actes des (...)

27While Torreton’s claim to be the very first French actor to play the role should be qualified with further contexts, it is true that Henry V is very infrequently staged in France in the twentieth century. Even counting the aforementioned 1953 and 1962 productions – both of which were not major venues – the history play has been peculiarly absent on the French stage. Like a penumbra, previous productions of the same play haunt the present one by triggering some form of theatrical déjà vu in audiences’ memories, as explored by Marvin Carlson in his The Haunted Stage (2003). Without the long shadow of major actors who came before him, Torreton had the freedom to present his own interpretation of the English monarch. Another factor at work, as translator Jean-Michel Déprats surmises, is that French artists and audiences are averse to the Shakespearean mingling of epic, comedic and tragic modes.23 The popularity of any given play in any given culture reflects that culture’s perceived affinity with the motifs of the play.

• 24 Peter J. Smith, “Richard Eyre’s King Lear: A Brexit Allegory (first shown on BBC2, 9.30pm on 28 May (...)

30Accruing site-specific meanings, King Lear now holds an important place in cinema and theatre works that rethink disability, mortality, and aging. New works articulate these themes through narratives about inter-generational conflicts. The theme of divisive politics gained further relevance in the post-Brexit era after the U.K.’s June 23, 2016, referendum to leave the European Union. An example of site-specific readings of Shakespeare is Richard Eyre’s 2018 film King Lear (BBC), which has been interpreted as a Brexit allegory.24 Turned out of doors by his daughters, Anthony Hopkins’ exiled Lear finds himself an unaccommodated man in a refugee camp under pouring rain.

• 25 Johan Callens, “The Wooster Group’s Hamlet, According to the True, Original Copies”, Theatre Journa (...)

33This approach to a classical text anticipates the Wooster Group’s meta-media and multi-media Hamlet (dir. Elizabeth LeCompte, 2007) in which the actors projected onstage a filmed version of Richard Burton’s 1964 Hamlet (dir. John Gielgud). Like a penumbra, Burton’s performance ghosts and frames the Wooster Groups’ production, befitting Hamlet the “spectral play.”25 It also becomes a pretext, as the poster of Olivier’s film does in Ophélia, for artistic recycling and creativity.

• 26 Joubin, Shakespeare and East Asia, op. cit., p. 190-191.

35Adaptations operate at the crossroads of fiction and reality and represent an aggregate of overlapping localities. This feature gives the false impression that audiences everywhere would see universal messages with equal valence in Shakespeare. In fact, the local is not always the antithesis to the global or an antidote to the hegemonic domination that has been stereotypically associated with the West. Directors working in English and other languages have to negotiate similar challenges of presenting historical worldviews to modern audiences. Some of them use similar strategies despite their cultural differences. The design of Peter Brook’s production of Titus Andronicus (1955) in Stratford-upon-Avon, for example, echoed Asian-inspired stylization. Lavinia has scarlet streamers coming out of her mouth, symbolizing blood, after her mutilation. The abstract, minimalist set distinguished Brook’s production from most English productions of that play at the time which resorted to naturalistic portrayals of horror. Similarly, Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa’s adaptation of the same play in 2006 used red ribbons to symbolize blood, which stood out against the mostly white and sterile set. Ninagawa’s production at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works festival treated the play as myth. It presented recurring rituals in a cycle, such as the theme of revenge, through symbolism.26

• 27 Courtney Lehmann, Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Post Modern, Ithaca, Cornel (...)

36Cross-cultural residues can be found even in performances that are regarded as traditionally Anglophone, such as Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (Bazmark Films, 1996). Due to Luhrmann’s use of Shakespeare’s language for indexical value, the film has not usually been taught from the perspective of global studies. The film pitches Latin American Catholicism against North American Protestantism in its costumes, sets, and accents adopted by the Montagues and Capulets. Early modern English, protestant anxieties about Catholic Italy, as reflected in Shakespeare’s play, are presented as sources of misunderstanding and conflict in modern gangland in the film. Mexico City and Boca del Rio in Veracruz, the film’s primary shooting locations, are dressed up as a fictional American city called Verona Beach. The fictional and filming locations, attitudes toward Latinity in the film and Elizabethan English fantasies about Spain and Italy are meshed together to create a new “site” where youthful exuberance, religious sentiments and early modern and postmodern notions of feud and hatred play out. The campy film also parodies – for audiences familiar with other films – Italian director Franco Zeffirelli’s lusty Romeo and Juliet (1968).27

• 28 For video highlights and an interview, see Alexa Alice Joubin and Peter S. Donaldson, ed., The MIT (...)
• 29 Mike Pearson, Site-Specific Performance, New York, Palgrave, 2010, p. 1-2. See also Miwon Kwon, One (...)

37While site-specific performances – works designed to respond to and amplify the ambience of a venue, such as Eugenio Barba’s Ur-Hamlet in the city of Elsinore and in Kronborg Castle, 200628 – are a distinctive genre in its own right, site-specific epistemologies inform all adaptations by virtue of their unique cultural reference points such as their setting and performance venues. The stage and, in the case of film, the cinema auditorium, are “sites of imagination” that are being “transformed by the disruptive presence of performance seeking a … site-determined [and] site-conscious relationship” with new audiences.29 Audiences and actors encounter each other in this new space between fiction and reality. “Site” therefore is constituted by the setting of a narrative, the city and venue of a performance or screening, and an adaptation’s cultural reference points. HamletIRAN’s reference point may be Iranian politics, but it is staged on a U.S. campus where such topics as the Green Movement are less sensitive. The part of site-specific epistemologies that an audience can access depends on their theatre-going habits and cultural backgrounds.

• 30 Alvin Eng Hui Lim, “Thinking Virtually in a Distracted Globe: Archiving Shakespeare in Asia” in Doc (...)

38Just as live performances and film screenings reenact site-specific meanings, as Alvin Lim writes, digital video archives are also informed by their own site specificity in terms of the cultural location of curatorial labor and the location of consumption of the archival materials (points of access).30 Viewing digital Shakespeare as a performed event – whether asynchronous or synchronous – connects the concept of re-play to liveness in performance.

• 31 Alexa Alice Joubin, “Global Shakespeare 2.0 and the Task of the Performance Archive”, Shakespeare S (...)

39Site-specific meanings of literature take a disembodied form in digital videos. The rise of global Shakespeares is part and parcel of the proliferation of digital videos on commercial and open-access platforms. In contrast to in-person performance events and analogue videos, digital video is a form of instantaneous, inter-connected communication. It is non-linear and non-sequential in nature. My research indicates that digital video has the unique ability to “support instant access to any sequence in a performance, as well as the means to re-order and annotate sequences, and to bring them into meaningful conjunction with other videos, texts and image collections.”31 Digital videos – despite their disembodied form – are key elements in shaping and propagating new, site-specific epistemologies.

• 32 TDR Editors, “Forum: After COVID-19, What?” TDR: The Drama Review 64.3, Fall 2020, 191-224, p. 208- (...)
• 33 Creation Theatre, The Tempest, accessible online at: https://www.creationtheatre.co.uk/shows/the-te (...)
• 34 The Public Theatre, Brave New Shakespeare, accessible online at: https://publictheater.org/news-ite (...)

40The third and last tool we will use draws on digital performance studies. The outbreak of the global pandemic of COVID-19 closed live theatre events and cinemas worldwide, but the crisis also accelerated the globalization of Shakespearean performance. Theatre director Erin B. Mee writes optimistically that COVID-19 has created “an exciting new performance environment,” bringing artists and audiences together “from numerous nations” and creating “new possibilities for collaboration.” Digital forms of video communication have enabled “artists from around the world” to gather in virtual spaces “playing to international audiences rather than […] to people who can get to a particular piece of real estate.”32 Thanks to Zoom, TikTok, and other platforms, any performance is now potentially a global event. For their participatory performance of The Tempest, Creation Theatre and Big Telly Theatre companies used the tagline: “live, interactive, and in your living room” anywhere in the world.33 The Public Theatre in New York launched the Brave New Shakespeare Challenge.34 They shared videos of their actors reading act 2 scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet in multiple languages, and invited the general public the share their own. The initiative has a global outlook, as evidenced by its emphasis of multilingual, user-created contents.

• 35 Worthen was quoted in Alexis Soloski, “Is This a Livestream I See Before Me?” New York Times, 13 Ma (...)

42Due to lockdown orders and restrictions on travel, audiences – trapped at home – took to streaming to engage with Shakespeare as a familiar classic. The pandemic has led to a proliferation of born-digital and digitized archival videos of Shakespeare in Western Europe, Canada, the UK and the US. Key players included the Berliner Ensemble, La Comédie Française, the Globe Theatre in London, the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, Stratford Festival in Canada, and the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C. Digital streaming – live or pre-recorded – has helped Shakespeare go viral on a global scale. One reason for Shakespeare’s global popularity on digital media, as W. B. Worthen surmises, is its status as comforting, familiar go-to-material for uplifting the spirits during the pandemic.35 Shakespeare skyrocketed to the top of the list of digital performance events during the pandemic in the forms of memes, quotable quotes about Shakespeare and the plague, and performances of select scenes.

• 36 Douglas M. Lanier, “Text, performance, screen: Shakespeare and critical media literacy,” Cahiers Él (...)

43There is one caveat. The screen interface immerses audiences in an alternate universe in such a way that audiences rarely question the screen’s aesthetic function. That interface often makes itself transparent even though it is generating the dramaturgical meanings central to the narratives. Douglas Lanier has urged critics to give equal weight, in their analyses of “screen[ed] Shakespeare,” to formal techniques as well as the politics of the medium of screen. In the post-COVID era, it is important to resist, as Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerri argue, “the impulse to abstract and smooth out the particularities of screens.”36 I propose we achieve this by distinguishing live broadcasts of theatre performances in cinemas before COVID-19 from the remediation of Shakespeare in our current time – the mediatization of performance through such digital platforms as Zoom as well as the use of digital tools for remedial purposes due to COVID-related restrictions on public performances as public health measures.

• 37 Pascale Aebischer, “Viral Shakespeare: Binge-watching Hamlet in Lockdown”, The Royal Central School (...)
• 38 WHO World Health Organization, Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard, 2020, accessible online at (...)

44As measures to contain the spread of the virus, the lockdown and stay-at-home orders have accelerated digital globalization, redefining liveness along the way. As Pascale Aebischer suggests, as a “chronological order” that seems to slow down time,37 the lockdown motivates at-home audiences to break free of the limit of their temporality by engaging in escapism. There are also the spatial constraints imposed by the viral containment measure. Mobility is limited, even within one’s own neighborhood. By late April 2020, 54% of the global population (4.2 billion people) were subject to complete or partial lockdowns.38 Audiences who are now “bounded in a nutshell” (Hamlet 2.2.273) seek virtual connections that transport them beyond their now fixed geographic locations to an alternative universe.

• 39 Anne Midgette, “An Aida that aspires to give street cred to grandiosity”, The Washington Post Septe (...)

45Digital broadcasting is nothing new, for, in the past decade, prominent organizations such as the Metropolitan Opera and Barbican Center have broadcast their programming to theatres and cinemas around the world, both live and pre-recorded. In the summer of 2017, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts broadcast in real-time Washington National Opera’s performance of Aida (dir. Francesca Zambello) to the Nationals Park in Washington, D.C.39 Both the audiences in the Kennedy Center and those in the baseball stadium enjoyed the show live – the former in the same space as the singers and the latter synchronously in a different space. These indoor and open-air digital performances remained “live,” communal experiences.

• 40 Erin Sullivan, “The Audience is Present: Aliveness, Social Media and the Theatre Broadcast Experien (...)
• 41 Aebischer, art. cit., 2020.

46The new genre of born-digital performances has redefined the notion of liveness as “a temporal and spatial entity.”40 The global pandemic has further expanded the idea of liveness. Asynchronous digital videos do not so much replicate theatrical experiences as they enable experiential and affective quality on personal electronic devices for private consumption. Blurring the boundary between film and theatre, both genres are detached from the palpable bodily presence of actors. Notably, viewers’ own subjectivity is also disembodied.41

• 42 Neil Constable, quoted in Tim Dams, “Shakespeare’s Globe Could Close Permanently due to Coronavirus (...)

48The pandemic has caused grief and damage to social infrastructures, but it has also helped a few theatre companies reach mass, global audiences on an unprecedented scale. By May 18, 2020, the London Globe already garnered 1.9 million viewers on their YouTube channel, which was cited by the organization as evidence of the “huge appetite for culture at a time of national crisis” when they bid for support from the UK’s Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sports during the lockdown.42 The Globe is unique among British theatres in that it has a predominantly international, tourist audience base even before the pandemic.

• 43 Alexis Soloski, “Review: Living the ‘Dream,’ on Your Laptop or Phone”, The New York Times 17 March (...)

52The highlight was the show’s global reach. Questions came in from all over the world, from as far as Melbourne, during the post-show discussion session. The global visibility and huge turnout were welcome news for the RSC, but the technological wonders failed to woo some critics. The New York Times called it “a small copse of some really lovingly rendered trees.” The Guardian acknowledges the technology could well be “a new arrow for the quiver of live theatre” while critiquing the show’s lack of “an emotional dimension.”43