‘Digital theatre is exciting, because it’s not a film’: In conversation with the cast and crew of Creation Theatre’s The Witch of Edmonton — Part 2
by Gemma Allred & Benjamin Broadribb
In the first part of our conversation with the cast and crew of Creation Theatre’s The Witch of Edmonton, we discussed the process behind adapting Rowley, Dekker and Ford’s 1621 play to a digital medium in a way that spoke to our present moment. In this second part, we spoke about the digital theatre journey Creation have gone on from The Tempest in April 2020 to now, reflecting on what the company have found along that journey that they have kept — and what, if anything, they have left behind. Get ready for conversations about the different approaches to tragedy and comedy in a digital format, the parallels between in-person and online site-specific theatre — and why it’s harder to get the audience to turn their cameras on now than it was in April 2020…
Lola Boulter — Winnifrede
Guy Clarke — Frank Thorney
Graeme Rose — Old Carter
Giles Stoakley — Old Thorney / Production Manager
Anna Tolputt — Mother Sawyer
Laura Wright — Director / Adaptation
Giles:
The idea that has always been central to Creation shows is that plays only work with strong storytelling. That is actually even more true with digital theatre because productions tend to be shorter, and the audience’s concentration is of necessity lower, because they’re sat in their own living room with stuff going on around them. If you don’t have a very strong, very direct story that people engage with very quickly, you will lose people’s interest. At the beginning [of the pandemic], I think we did that with a lot of audience interaction, and we’ve gradually moved away from that, partially because the technology gets in the way a little bit! But at the same time, I think the technology has clarified some of the storytelling because we’re able to use things like soundtracks now that we weren’t able to in the past, drop in video clips relatively seamlessly, make backgrounds more indicative of where people are, and actually enable people to communicate on a screen. I think what’s exciting about digital theatre is that there is an enormous spectrum, and we’re in a mish-mash of learning to play with it.
I don’t think I would say that we’ve discarded anything. The Witch of Edmonton [TWoE] will be similar stylistically to The Duchess of Malfi [performed in March 2021]: it’ll be a relatively straightforward play, moments of audience interaction will be there, but they’ll be very specific and very controlled. Romeo and Juliet [performed in May 2021] and The Tempest were very similar in the way that we used the audience, in that they became a method of storytelling, albeit in very different ways. I think TWoE is actually much more interesting for an audience member when you feel like a voyeur, and you have that space to consider ‘Am I strong enough to have made a different decision?’. I think there’s a lot of stuff from The Tempest and The Time Machine [a digital adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novella performed in June 2020] and Romeo and Juliet that we’re not using in this show. But I don’t think that we’ve lost anything. It’s just that we’ve changed where the needle points on the spectrum of audience interaction — it’s the audience involvement in telling the story that we’ve changed.
Laura:
I firmly believe if I’d cut the script in a different way and said, ‘I want this to happen, and that to happen’, Creation would have found a way to do it. I didn’t, because that’s not what I wanted for this adaptation. From my point of view, I don’t think there are limits to the tech — I suppose there are a couple of limits here and there, but I never feel that Creation would say they can’t do something. I’ve yet to find something Creation can’t do!
Giles:
I’ve always said that there’s only two things to stop you doing things: safety and budget.
Graeme:
Over the course of the last year, it feels like Creation have developed a toolbox and have various tools that can be brought out as and when required. But audience expectation, and the willingness for audiences to want to engage dynamically, is always shifting. My sense throughout the course of the Digital Rep [Company from January to June 2021] was that one of [Chief Executive] Lucy [Askew]’s prerogatives is about finding engaging, dynamic ways of involving the audience and nurturing interaction. I think the audience appetite has changed through lockdown — you could see that very clearly. By the time we got to Romeo and Juliet, more and more of the audience were choosing to switch their cameras off, and just have a much more relaxed approach.
Giles:
Do you think that’s because we are consciously not doing comedy, though, and it’s a long time since we have?
Graeme:
I don’t know about that. My suspicion is a little bit of Zoom fatigue, which started to impact on audiences.
Giles:
But if you consciously said to people, ‘We are going to do a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the way that we did with The Tempest’, for instance — a knockabout comedy — do you think that people’s expectations are sufficiently different to mean that they’ll have cameras on more? I don’t know the answer to that. I think that you’re quite right about Zoom fatigue. That has played a big part in audience interactivity. But, for example, there were comic moments in Grimm Tales [for Fragile Times and Broken People, a digital adaptation of traditional fairy tales performed in January 2021], but it was essentially very dark. Whilst [Keeping Up With] Kassandra [a digital modern-day adaptation of Ancient Greek myths performed in June 2021] definitely had comedy in it, it was really a play about social issues. Romeo and Juliet — again, it’s got comedy sections in it, but really it’s a tragedy. It couldn’t be something like The Importance of Being Earnest — not drawing-room comedy — but if it were Shakespearean, interactive, slightly improvised comedy, I wonder whether people might buy back into the idea of being part of it again.
Laura:
I think you’re right, Giles — it’s dependent on the play. I don’t think that audience interaction is over, I think it’s just on hiatus.
Lola:
The first digital show that I performed in was Romeo and Juliet, and I invited my parents to watch it at home. Even though it was halfway through lockdown, the reason they turned off their camera wasn’t because of Zoom fatigue — they just knew that the actors could see them, and they could see the actors, and they didn’t know how to react! I know for a fact that, if they had their camera on, they would feel that they have to be part of the performance. Before I worked with Creation, I watched Malfi, and I didn’t want to take away from the actual performance itself. I turned my camera off because I knew I would just be looking at myself — but maybe that’s an actor thing!
Guy:
I’m the same as Lola. Whenever I go and see stuff on Zoom, I always turn my camera off. Like Giles says, you want to be a voyeur. I don’t want to be part of the screen, part of the interaction — which is I suppose weird, because if you were in a theatre, you absolutely would! But I suppose we have much less space here, both for everyone involved in the performance and for everyone who’s watching — the field of vision is so much smaller.
Anna:
I wonder if it’s become more acceptable to turn your camera off? As the pandemic rolled on, it stopped being impolite.
Laura:
I think a lot about all the amazing things digital theatre does. It can give you incredible access if you are, for instance, neurodivergent and it’s difficult for you to be in a physical theatre space. That’s fantastic, and I can’t champion that enough. But on the other hand, it asks you to share your intimate space with everyone else. It’s the audience’s private space, and I wonder how exposing that feels.
The other thing as well is how it’s like early modern theatre. That sense that some people want to sit on the stage, some people want to be seen and be part of it, and some people don’t. I’ve often wondered whether we could do that — whether we could give people ‘gallery seats’ where they were on the stage like gentlemen, and then have Groundlings elsewhere!
Lola:
Because Romeo and Juliet was pick your own path, I think that brought in a new bunch of audience members — people who don’t necessarily go to the theatre. It became a lot more accessible and had the appeal of choosing your own path, but I think maybe they didn’t want to mess up or do the wrong thing. Even if you do get given the instructions, there is a fear that ‘If I have my camera on and do something wrong, then people are going to judge me and it’s going to take away from the show’, that kind of thing. I do think Creation do a lot of audience care with that, which is good.
Giles:
Guy and Lola were both in Creation’s The Wind in the Willows over the course of the summer [in 2021], which was an in-person interactive show for kids, and for me, it offers a really interesting parallel. There were audience groups going round a meadow in north Oxford — a group sees a scene done by an actor, then move on to the next one — and actually, within every group of ten or twelve, you’ve probably got one family who are really excited about participating, and one person who absolutely does not want to be spoken to whatsoever!
Guy:
Absolutely! You’ve always got the whole range in pretty much every group.
Giles:
And I think it’s the same principle for digital theatre — people are prepared to accept it in different ways.
Graeme:
One of the brilliant things about site-specific work, and why I am evangelical about it, is that the rules of engagement are up for grabs. All of the paratheatrical mechanisms are there to be played with in a sense, and audience expectations can also be played with. One of the great beauties about performing in a site-specific piece is that you can look your audience in the eye with your facility to be able to read people, and judge whether they’re up for stuff instantly. You can tune yourself to understand that — and to understand how to, perhaps, just push the margins of those people who are a little bit reluctant, but you sense could take it and really respond well to it. Obviously, on a digital platform, that’s really difficult. In live performance, there is a complicity, an understanding of the contract that is being made, and if you can’t see your audience, it’s really difficult to know where you’re pitching it. So it is lovely to see the audience, it’s lovely to understand that they’re on your side. And I suppose there is the question: if you can’t see your audience, does the performance have the same currency?
Laura:
I’ve just seen Graeme do some site-specific work in Oxford last weekend, which was amazing, and it was powerful because of that space: because you were in that specific church at that specific moment. But it did make me think that Zoom gives a different kind of spatial parity. What you’re not getting is actors at the front [of the space], or raised up, or framed by a proscenium arch. As far as the audience is concerned, the actors are all the same height, all the same size — they all take up the same space. You can’t digitally ‘manspread’, for want of a better way to say it! And that’s quite a nice thing in terms of the intimacy Graeme is talking about. That parity, that equality straight away — your box to their box. There’s something quite intimate and interesting when actors come out into the audience, but also a bit intrusive sometimes. You can see some people quite physically pull back!
Graeme:
You can feel that with an audience when you’re performing, you understand the energy that’s going on. That’s the challenge, really — how to read your audience — so that you can take one performance, and then you can move it into the next performance and recalibrate.
Lola:
I think when things go wrong in a digital play, it’s a lot more charming than when things go wrong in an in-person play.
Guy:
Lola’s a bit more of a veteran when it comes to digital stuff than I am, because I am absolutely terrified about the prospect of one of the numerous devices in front of me slightly malfunctioning! If something goes wrong on a physical stage, you wink at the audience and you make up a line and it’s fine — but I can’t do that here.
Giles:
Everyone understands, because everyone’s been in a Zoom meeting where they got kicked out, or your cat walks past, or your child interrupts. We’re not doing a film, we’re making a piece of live theatre. The reason why The Play That Goes Wrong [by UK-based Mischief Theatre Company] is so popular is because people like seeing things go wrong in theatre — because they think that they’re the only ones who’ve ever seen it. It’s that individuality, that personal performance that people are excited by. That is why I think digital theatre is exciting, because it’s not a film — what you are seeing will never happen again. We’re all going to do the same lines every night, but we’re all going to do them slightly differently.
Laura:
There’s such a different energy each night. Thinking back to Malfi, there were slow and sad productions, and there was one with an absolute frantic energy. They were so distinct — not better or worse, just different.
Giles:
We’ve all had it as an actor when someone gives you a line that’s slightly different, and you realise something about your character and the play that you’ve never seen — it impacts the way that you do the whole thing that night, and once you’ve changed the way you’re performing everyone else around you has to change. I just think that’s really exciting, and important in why digital theatre is distinct from film — because of that liveness.
Gemma and Ben would like to offer their heartfelt thanks to Lola, Guy, Graeme, Giles, Anna and Laura for being so generous with their time in speaking to us. If you missed Part 1 of our conversation with the cast and crew of The Witch of Edmonton, you can read it here.
Creation Theatre’s production of The Witch of Edmonton is currently running until Sunday 20 March 2022. Tickets and more information are available on Creation’s website.
Production Details:
The Witch of Edmonton
Presented by Creation Theatre Company via Auditorium (online platform), 9–20 March 2022. Directed by Laura Wright. With Lola Boulter (Winnifride), Guy Clark (Frank Thorney), Leda Douglas (Kate Carter), Ryan Duncan (Dog), Chloe Lemonius (Susan Carter), Graeme Rose (Old Carter), Giles Stoakley (Old Thorney), P.K. Taylor (Old Ratcliffe), Anna Tolputt (Mother Sawyer), and Amelia Fewtrill (Anne Ratcliffe).
