‘A vision of the Island’: Immersion meets Isolation in Creation Theatre’s The Tempest
Last week, Gemma wrote our first piece on Shakespearean adaptation under the COVID-19 lockdown, focusing on Made At Home’s Midsummer Night Stream which used video conferencing software Zoom to livestream an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play to YouTube. In this article, I’m considering Creation Theatre’s current production of The Tempest, which incorporated the functionality of Zoom further still to involve the audience directly. Instead of viewing a livestream of the cast performing into their webcams whilst isolated from each other, the audience was invited to the Zoom meeting alongside the actors in character, who could be seen amongst the spectators at the start of the show. Attending the meeting as a participant rather than simply witnessing it being streamed added a different dimension which, in many ways, felt as though it brought Creation’s Tempest closer to a theatrical experience than a screen adaptation.
Audience members were instructed to unmute their microphones upon entering the ‘meeting’, an action which, as the invitation email explained, meant that the production team could then take control of when audience mics were active throughout the show. Whether intended by Creation or not, a side effect of this was that all the audience members could be heard as they settled down for the production to start — the Zoom technology loosely recreating the experience of taking your seat in a busy auditorium for a few minutes before the production team muted all but the performers. Other choices pointed towards Creation’s Tempest being rooted in theatre rather than screen adaptation. Director Zoe Seaton used Zoom as far as possible as a theatre space rather than a video conferencing tool — for example, by placing green screens behind her performers, allowing virtual backgrounds to be changed to place the characters in a variety of settings.
That’s not to say that Seaton didn’t utilise the technology at her disposal to go beyond recreating a stage production. Adapted further in collaboration with Big Telly Theatre Company, this version of The Tempest was based on Creation’s immersive production which ran in Oxford during the summer of 2019, and the director used Zoom to recreate elements of this experience in some way for those watching at home. Having not seen the 2019 version, it’s difficult to say how close Seaton came to doing this, but it’s certainly the case that some felt more successful than others. Arguably the least effective came at the production’s opening, with Antonio’s (Giles Stoakley) ill-fated sea voyage reimagined as an elite cruise for fame-hungry noble celebs, complete with a press conference. During this section, members of the audience in role as ‘journalists’ were called upon to quiz the characters with questions pre-prepared by the production team and communicated through Zoom’s chat feature. It’s a construct I can imagine working well during the in-person immersive experience, but through the Zoom functionality it fell a little flat. It wasn’t clear enough exactly what was happening, and when a couple of audience members went off-script, it felt as though key plot set-up that the questions and their answers were designed to provide — such as the events that precede the start of the play, and the relationships between the different characters — became somewhat lost.
Elsewhere, the audience interaction worked much better. Most was facilitated by Ariel (Itxaso Moreno), who instructed the audience as ‘spirits’ to participate at several points, starting with rubbing their hands, clicking their fingers and clapping into their mics to create sound effects for the storm of Act 1. The production company used Zoom during these moments to ‘spotlight’ viewers who were joining in, emulating to a degree the kind of audience participation seen in 2019 during the Shakespeare’s Globe production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the RSC’s As You Like It. With Ariel talking directly to the audience — giving instructions such as singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ to lull the stranded nobles to sleep, then shaking their viewing screens to wake them up again later — the interactivity at these points linked Creation’s Tempest to British pantomime traditions. The cartoonish nature of Antonio, Sebastienne (Madeleine MacMahon) and Alonso (Al Barclay) in particular furthered this. The trio felt more like caricatured villains than complex versions of Shakespeare’s characters, making the ways in which the audience were invited to manipulate them innocently humorous rather than anything more sinister.
The most successful and memorable moment of audience interaction was facilitated not by Ariel, however, but by Alonso. Seaton reimagined Prospero (Simon Spencer-Hyde) as a wizard of technology in her adaptation, spying on the island through Big-Brother-style surveillance. After discovering one of Prospero’s CCTV cameras, Alonso reversed the feed which, rather than letting him see the other inhabitants of the Island, allowed him to view audience members at home. Overjoyed, Alonso took the opportunity to ask the audience to show him their ‘furry friends’ to cheer him up, prompting spectators to hold up any nearby pets or cuddly toys. The production team then spotlighted several audience members in turn, with Alonso enthusiastically commenting on the dogs, cats and teddies on show.
On a surface level, the moment was one of pure fun, riffing off the current cultural moment in which pets are finding their way onto screens as people use video conferencing to keep in touch with each other both professionally and personally. Alonso’s reaction also furthered the panto style of the production, looking out into the audience to comment on what he could see. The fact that those showing their pets and toys were doing so not in a theatre auditorium but in their own homes echoed another form of light entertainment: the Saturday night television variety show. British TV series such as Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway have repopularised at-home audience interaction, usually facilitated through either on-location crews or remote control cameras, a feature which became prominent in the UK during the 1990s through TV variety shows such as Noel’s House Party. At this moment, Alonso took on the role of compère, momentarily transforming The Tempest into a pseudo-variety show and creating a connection between the world of the play and that of the audience through a shared moment of light-hearted humour. For the audience, a hall of mirrors was created by Alonso turning the camera on them: as I watched others watching both the production and themselves from their sofas, Seaton’s adaptation brought to mind the consciously unpolished experience offered by Channel 4’s reality-documentary hybrid Gogglebox.
There is another reading of this moment, however, which is less benign.¹ Having witnessed Prospero using his all-seeing set-up to spy on the inhabitants of the island throughout the play, the audience was then thrust into the same position, with Alonso adopting the intrusive position Prospero has demonstrated and applying it to us. Prospero was regularly seen with a wall of monitors behind him, with whichever character he was focused upon often appearing on the screens, echoing both The Matrix Reloaded’s antagonistic Architect and The Truman Show’s obsessive mastermind Christof. Spencer-Hyde played Prospero as slightly menacing throughout, so it’s unlikely that the audience would feel as comfortable taking orders from him as they were from Barclay’s upper-class twit Alonso. The dynamic nonetheless remained the same: put in the position of power, Alonso took on the same role as Prospero and chose to exercise control over the audience. Despite his comedic nature as played by Barclay, the character wasn’t entirely without sinister undertones at this point, appearing with a snake (which he had aptly named ‘Gonzalo’) slithering about his shoulders as he directed the audience. It’s a touch which made Alonso feel more unnervingly villainous, reminiscent of the distinctive adversaries characteristic of Connery or Moore era Bond films. As a result, the spectators were perhaps giving in to the sense of power he exuded at this moment as much as wanting to show off the four-legged companions beside them.
Much like Made At Home’s Midsummer Night Stream, Creation’s 2020 version of The Tempest felt as though it was more interested in creating a joyous and uplifting version of a Shakespearean text for our current moment than interrogating the complexities of the play’s themes and characters. Seaton’s adaptation was clearly aimed at families and children, offering plenty of fun through its interactive elements and simplified hour-long version of the story. Even so, the production’s intertextuality with stage, cinema and small screen media showed that the way Shakespeare is being used by those in the arts to document and channel our current cultural moment is potentially both innovative and rich, even in what was on the surface a sixty-minute remote romp around a magical island.
Productions such as Creation’s Tempest, Made At Home’s Stream and others besides have popularised, if not created, a new form of performance — one which sits somewhere between theatre and screen, live and recorded, ephemerality and permanence, as well as bringing technology to the fore perhaps more than ever before. Whether this form will persist beyond the lockdown situation remains to be seen; but the performances being produced and streamed in this way are undeniably creating cultural artefacts closely tied to our current moment, and will offer a fascinating glimpse into the response of the arts to the global events of 2020 in years to come.
Creation Theatre’s The Tempest is currently running Zoom performances until Saturday 25th April 2020. For more information and to book tickets, visit their website.
¹ Thanks to Gemma for the discussions we had about this moment — her perspective and interpretation led to this reading being developed further and included in this article!
