‘All the world’s a stage’: A conversation with The Show Must Go Online’s Rob Myles
The Show Must Go Online (TSMGO) has been one of the most notable successes of Lockdown Shakespeare and a pre-eminent example of what Gemma and Ben recently defined as the second model of the form: Live Online Performances. It was founded, in the early days of theatre made for a lockdown audience, by Rob Myles, a multi-talented actor, director and writer, who is also responsible for the educational toolkit The Shakespeare Deck and its practical equivalent Cracking the Shakespeare Code. TSMGO has attracted actors and audiences alike from across the globe, with Myles having drawn on his extensive performance experience with companies such as Merely Theatre, who are known for their condensed, accessible productions.
Myles and his creative team produce a weekly experience which works through Shakespeare’s canon in chronological order and, more recently, has embraced the convergence of Shakespeare and popular culture. As discussed recently by Ben, TSMGO have collaborated with Quirk Books to deliver readings of the author Ian Doescher’s William Shakespeare’s Star Wars and The Taming of the Clueless. I spoke to Robert on the eve of their first adventure to a galaxy far, far away…
Ronan Hatfull: First of all, congratulations on the amazing success of the project. I’m not sure if you could have imagined the scale of the success until you had a very clear plan of what you wanted to do, but it’s been astonishing.
Rob Myles: It really caught us by surprise, but the reason why it’s been successful is a combination of being the right idea at the right time, then also the fact that [co-creator] Sarah [Peachey] and I managed to turn it into a project quickly enough that we were the first mover in the space. We were able to create a show with a good enough quality that people wanted to come back and see it week after week. So, it was a combination of great timing and a very fortunate situation that we happened to have an idea we could execute, at a time people really needed it. It’s just gone on from there.
Ronan: Yes, and the formula you have has been so effective. I think it gives participants structure and that’s what people want at the moment, if they wish to commit their time. At what point did the idea of performing the whole Shakespearean canon come into your mind and why do you think that you went with that structure?
Rob: For me, it’s an answer in three parts. The first part is that is that I’d been involved in a reading group, which was organised by a friend of mine called Jonathan LeBillon, who had done a similar kind of idea with a different chronology, but had nevertheless done the plays in the order in which they were believed to have been written. It was a very informal, lowkey thing with ten to fifteen people in a pub, reading for the pleasure of reading it. There was no audience and no rehearsal — everyone just came in and cold read it. I dropped into probably four or five of those over the course of the run, and always really enjoyed them. So, if you like, that’s where the idea was incepted. It was something that I already had seen done and knew had existed before.
I’m a Shakespeare specialist, and because of that I knew that I was going to want to put some Shakespeare out there. I had lost a gig that was going to take me through April and probably five or six friends had tweeted that they just lost jobs as well. So, we were the first little snowflakes in the avalanche to come. It became apparent to me that it was going to become a big deal and there was all that ambiguity around whether or not the theatres were going to close. We didn’t wait for that. Our first show came out either the day before or the day after the theatres officially closed. So, we’d already produced one show by the time that news hit. Regional, touring and mid-scale theatre was already starting to collapse while the big West End venues were staying open. So, working in that space meant the timing really helped us.
In terms of doing the whole canon, it was certainly influenced by having seen a similar thing done before, but also by knowing this situation wasn’t going anywhere any time soon, and requiring a structure for the project. We needed to make decisions very quickly. If we have that structure, then what we do next, week-to-week, is one decision that we don’t have to make. Similarly, we chose the Wikipedia chronology, because we felt like we should go with the wisdom of crowds! Everybody has their own opinion on what the chronology is, and I’m sure many, many different takes are equally valid. But, for simplicity, we thought that this was the one that everybody could check and reference very easily, because if you put ‘Shakespeare chronology’ into Google that is the first one that comes up! It was the easiest way to go with it for public facing reasons.
Throughout this whole process we have had to, in order to survive, strive for ruthless efficiency in the style of a Formula One pit crew. We need to make every decision we can make in the minimum time it takes to make it. We cast Richard III, with 71 parts, in one afternoon — that meant Sydney Aldridge, Matthew Rhodes, Sarah and I getting every variable in place to make it possible, while simultaneously rehearsing and producing Titus.
And so we took to the chronology. We made only one edit, which was to put the Henry VIs in part order, rather than in chronological order. So we did 1-2-3 instead of 2-3-1. That was just so you get a chronological sense of the War of the Roses. We took out Edward III because we weren’t aware of it at time of publishing and then we got rid of Love’s Labour’s Won, Cardenio, Sir Thomas More and a couple of other ones where we didn’t have the texts for them, so I think we’ve ended up with 37 plays, which is what my complete works looks like from probably five years ago. Our scholarship isn’t quite up to date, but it’s close enough!
Having the need to make decisions quickly and use information that is accessible to everyone is important, because, again, a large part of our mission is about making Shakespeare accessible to everyone. I also love the idea of directing all 37 plays in eight months. Someone in the cast mentioned that it’s only ever been done once before by the BBC and our videos are available on YouTube, so they’re freely accessible forever. We’re hoping that they are going to be valuable educational resources, and institutions have already got in touch with us about doing 60 and 90 minute cut-down versions, which we might look at doing as well.
There have been many unexpected consequences! Probably the best way of putting it is that there has been a kind of cascade effect: we had the idea of doing something very simple with rehearsed readings, and then the combination of us getting carried away, and the creativity and the willingness of the actors, very quickly meant it became a lot more like a performance.
Ronan: The mix of it being rehearsed readings, as you envisaged it, and then morphing into performance — how would you say that process has manifested itself, and is that influenced by your in-depth rehearsal schedule?
Rob: In-depth! Haha. The schedule amounts to about fifteen hours. It’s about two days rehearsal across three days that we actually do in terms of contact time. For instance, at the moment I’m reading The Comedy of Errors. We just finished Act 3 Scene 2, so we are reading and understanding the play, making decisions about how we want to produce it, and also looking at those set-piece moments. We highlight and colour code all the same cues, the actions and the stage directions so that we can, at a glance, work out how we’re going to bring those moments to life.
That happened a lot more organically on the first reading because we just grabbed it as quickly as we could from the internet. Shakespeare’s implicit stage directions are encoded into the text. So, if you’re going to perform the play, there’s no way no way around doing the actions as well. I, as a director and actor, have always believed that the claim ‘all you need is the words’ is nonsense. He didn’t write only the words, he wrote in action, spectacle, and set-pieces that were meant to shock and awe people. He burned down a playhouse with a cannon. And that is as much a part of the fabric of why Shakespeare is great as anything else. You do Macbeth without a great fight at the end, and it’s like a souffle that you’ve taken out of the oven too early — it just collapses.
I’ve seen that happen in umpteen productions, so you need to make the most of the moments that Shakespeare has embroidered in, as much as you do the words themselves. When we were doing The Two Gentlemen of Verona, fortunately with that being one of Shakespeare’s first plays, it was mercifully simple, and so it gave us an easy way in. That’s something where the chronology I think has really paid off in a way that we weren’t necessarily anticipating. There’s been a lovely symmetry between us learning this new form and Shakespeare mastering his own craft at the same time. With his ambition increasing week on week, so our ability to tackle that ambition through this format has increased incrementally enough for us to keep pace with his innovation.
Ronan: That means that the chronological structure makes even more sense.
Rob: It’s one of those things that we didn’t consciously articulate beforehand — it’s just a happy coincidence — but nevertheless it has been great. We made the decision to try and keep the runtime two-and-a-half hours, because otherwise that is straining the kind of integrity of YouTube as a medium. You know, the average watch time on YouTube, I think is probably something like 1 minute 45 seconds, so the fact that we actually have audience retention — people who stay and watch the whole play — these are all things that we had no evidence to suggest would be the case.
When we started it, we thought we might get 40 people watching — we had 700 people watching live for the first show — and by the end, I think there were 500 still there. So, the retention rate for these is off the charts, which I think, again, is all to do with the fact that Shakespeare done well in any format will always grip people.
We knew that we wanted to use cameras on for onstage and off for offstage, so that you’re only seeing the actors who are relevant to that scene. What we didn’t expect was the kind of Muppet Show-vibe, especially once you get into the History Plays where we’ve got large ensembles. Naturally, onstage, a director’s instinct is to create focus on certain characters by moving them closer to the audience, for instance, or having people just fade into the background. We can’t do that on Zoom — it’s flat, it’s two-dimensional — and because of that, everybody needs to be active for every second of the show.
They need to be listening and having an opinion on what’s being said and to show that they are actively expressing this through their face and bodies, if not through their words. Then, if the audience’s eyes do roam, they can see immediately how characters think about the events that are taking place in the scene. That has been part of a series of unintended consequences or bonuses of doing a show on Zoom — the fact that it allows the audience to self-select what they want to see, rather than you as a director dictating which people they’re going to watch.
Certainly that’s the way we’ve chosen to do it. We’ve had a lot of companies get in touch — probably over twenty companies now — for advice and guidance on how to replicate what we’re doing. The first thing they ask is “how do you spotlight someone so that you can ignore everyone else?” I answer that question with a question: do you need to, or can you allow the words to draw the focus to them, and allow the audience to explore the reactions that other people are having to those words?
Sarah and I both work in innovation when we’re not in theatre. We work with companies on new product development, and that has given us an advantage in terms of be able to think about this format on its own terms, rather than trying to force ‘theatre’ upon it. We’ve just committed to what Zoom can do, accepted the limitations of what it can’t and built from there. That’s definitely been intrinsic to the evolution of the format.
The Henry VI plays were definitely where everything kicked into high gear. We knew, for instance, that we could share our screens, but we didn’t know how we could necessarily deploy that until our fight directors had to pre-record their fight.
Similarly, you can share audio only, and that allowed us to introduce sound cues, which is such an essential part of the history plays because you’ve got massive battles, alarums, flourishes — it’s just this never-ending barrage of acoustics — so we committed to getting those in and that drove that aspect of the format.
Then, we immediately fell into a similar trap to Shakespeare himself: you’ve got to top yourself every week, or at least that’s how everyone feels. Every show has to be better than the show before it, and that’s a pressure that we have tried not to let get to us, but nevertheless, we have sought novelty each week. We have tried to make sure that at least one thing each week is new.
A lot of that has been driven just by circumstance. So, for instance, in Richard III, Clarence is written in as being drowned in the malmsey butt, which is a barrel of wine, and it’s written to happen offstage because Shakespeare couldn’t have done it onstage with his technology.
Similarly, in Titus Andronicus, the cutting off of Lavinia’s hands and tongue is an action that happens offstage because he wouldn’t have been able to do it convincingly onstage. Because of our format, we were able to take Shakespeare’s dramatic intention and actually show it rather than tell it.
So, in each case, we decided to do that, and that was driven by multiple innovations. For instance, we had stunt doubles — our two fight directors — doing the actual cutting off of Lavinia’s tongue. They actually did the cutting off part, but we had the actor — because it was a modern adaptation — film it on his phone, so it was as though you were seeing through his phone’s eye-view.
That’s how we connected the dots and so were able to deploy methods that made sense in our modern context to achieve things that would have been impossible in Shakespeare’s context, and probably impossible in live theatre as well. You can’t show someone drowning in a barrel of wine convincingly in live theatre, but you absolutely can do it live and convincingly on Zoom.
I think that trajectory is a really interesting one because we, at this point, are exhausted by the pace and demands of four History plays. It is so fitting that having done these hard plays with all these set pieces that have driven those innovations that we now have The Comedy of Errors, which is the shortest, silliest and lightest play of all the canon. It feels like Shakespeare giving himself a break!
Ronan: Yes, it has to feel that way! You’re using the Wikipedia order and that’s fascinating because, in times like these, you’re suggesting that the authoritative version of the chronology is the first one that comes up on Google, and, in doing so, you’re being very pragmatic. It’s also interesting that, by experiencing the order of play creation as authentically as you can, you’re getting to experience hypothetically, but very plausibly, how Shakespeare would have experienced his own artistic process. That essence of ‘real time’ is fascinating. I’m also interested in how and if your approach to tone and genre has fluctuated or will change, given that you are going to perform every play?
Rob: I think that because we’re an internet show we can get away with things that you couldn’t get away with on a stage. For instance, a reviewer might write that a specific moment was atonal or clashed with the rest of the production, but because our method of presentation is so immediate, and the audience’s attention is just on the next thing rather than the thing as a whole, you literally can’t sit back from it to view it as a whole. You’re always in the moment with it because it’s on the screen and it’s two dimensional.
My rule is that I’ll never parody the play. However, in our production of Richard III, there was a character called Captain James Blunt and the ensemble member who was playing the character decided to dress it up like James Blunt, the pop star.
That was in the Richmond scenes, which were all very positive and optimistic and hopeful, and there to deliberately contrast that dark night of the soul that Richard is experiencing in Act 5. Because we’re doing this in people’s living rooms, we don’t have to set up a uniform ‘concept’ throughout the whole production, so here was a moment that entertained the audience. This was a reference that made Shakespeare feel closer to their lived experience, that gave the scene levity, which is what those scenes are there to do, because obviously Richmond is a propaganda device for Elizabeth I. It was achieving all the objectives, dramaturgically, that those things are there to do in the play. It was doing so in a way that was humorous and understandable to the audience and recognisable to the audience, but in a way that you would never ever have been able to get away with if you were doing an ‘actual show’. And so we have liberty to explore multiple dimensions.
The formula, if we have one, is innovation and maximising the creativity of the talent that we have in the room. We get live, visceral feedback from our audience, so we have very quickly got to understand what works for them, what they respond to, what they want more of, and that gives us a really clear idea of how to be effective in creating entertainment for them. We know a certain kind of approach works. A certain dimension will serve for a specific moment in a play, and we can draw on the context of the audience reaction from previous plays to build how we deploy that dimension in a future show.
I think that’s something that, historically, theatre-makers have largely not had to rely on. If it’s a comedy it’s easier, because they laugh, and if they don’t laugh, you know you’re doing something wrong! Fortunately, we have the opportunity to do some dark plays, and create some incredibly stirring, emotional scenes and see the audience reacting in real time to those scenes to know that the way that we’re doing them is effective. Do you see what I mean?
Ronan: I do! What, as an example of what you’re speaking about there, was the motivation behind making Titus Andronicus Tarantino-esque?
Rob: Yes, that was, again, seeking to provide novelty for our audience. That was the number one driver behind that and that’s something that’s always bubbling away in the back of my mind. I’m fortunate that Titus is one that I’d seen a production of before and so I knew that it was immensely violent. It seemed to me that, because people were in their homes, obviously, we’re not going to be able to do Roman costume, and so it was about how do we make this look and feel radically different from the Histories that we’d done. This is a very different type of play, and so we wanted to show that difference. That was the challenge area that we were addressing. When it comes to how do that, the play’s violence is so immediate and exploitative that Tarantino was the perfect reference for it.
If you’re in a rehearsal room with me, you’ll know that I use a lot of modern cinema references to articulate the flavour of the moment that I’m trying to create. So, it was a kind of shortcut for me to describe the play: it feels like a Tarantino film, so why don’t we just make it a Tarantino film? Because it was Shakespeare’s birthday that week, we also wanted to do something a little bit different. So that was an additional reason to add the novelty. Because we were dressing up, we invited our audience to dress up and people send in pictures and that was great! You dress up, you eat pastries and then you feel like you’re a part of it, because, of course, the whole point of this is community and connectedness.
In his exploration of their performance of William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, Ben defined TMSGO’s output ‘as metamodern in its approach: accepting the postmodern referentiality of [Ian] Doescher’s text whilst imbuing it with authenticity and earnestness’. This observation tallies with Myles’s evident enthusiasm for remaining faithful to Shakespeare’s text, whilst possessing the bravery and ingenuity to recognise that audiences will revel in the opportunity to participate in the action and make their own connections to popular culture.
By locating pockets of ‘Shakespop’[1] which will appeal to fans of the playwright and pop culture artefact alike and, of course, both, TSMGO have taken this a stage further by delivering an accessible theatre product, which takes a ready-made mash-up and imbues it with physical life, regardless of the invisible barrier of the digital screen.
The Show Must Go Online’s partnership with Quirk Books continued this week with Much Ado About Mean Girls and concludes next week with Get Thee Back to the Future. You can watch all past recordings of their performances on YouTube and visit their homepage for more information about how to participate.
[1] Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 5.
