Lockdown Dreams Part 1: Magic and Technology
As I’ve experienced more and more lockdown performances since March, I’ve been increasingly reminded of the third, and most famous, of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.¹ This was perhaps most true when watching Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) and Bard College’s Mad Forest, a production which Gemma noted ‘pushed the edges of what is possible in Live Online Performance’ through its use of technology. TFANA encouraged audience members to engage in a ‘feedback loop’ with them and the performers, asking questions through a live chat function about how they had managed the level of direction and production values achieved throughout their Zoom-facilitated production of the play. However, they chose not to reveal one or two of their tricks, keeping some of the most impressive technology used to create their Mad Forest ‘indistinguishable from magic’.
To date, TFANA is the exception in lockdown performance, with the majority of productions relying on the technology available to them through Zoom, YouTube and other programs readily accessible for their isolated actors. Returning to Clarke’s third law in perhaps a more literal sense, the relationship between technology and magic has perhaps become most pertinent in lockdown productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — which has also emerged as the Shakespeare play of choice for those creating new productions through live or filmed online performances. Gemma and I have already written about several new versions created and either performed live or released online since March. Last week saw at least three new versions of made for lockdown Dreams: The Show Must Go Online (TSMGO) performed their version of the play live on their YouTube channel last week; Fresh Life Theatre released Hermia: Heaven Unto Hell, a companion piece to their earlier Helena: Ugly as a Bear — both of which offer reimaginings of the young lovers’ plot of the play; and Arden Theatre Company (ATC) performed the play live via Zoom and streamed to YouTube twice on the same day.
So, what’s the reason for this abundance of Dreams? The play’s continuing popularity is almost certainly a factor — at least three different productions of Dream ran at the same time at major London theatres last year, for example, creating a ‘Summer of Dreams’ for theatregoers in the capital which we documented in our ‘Rethinking Dream’ series last October. Its perceived ability to appeal to, or be adapted for, audiences young and old perhaps makes Dream a good choice for those hoping to get as many people watching online as possible. But maybe it’s the contrasting realms —the court and the woods, mortal and magical — and the different groups of characters that inhabit them which offer those creating Shakespeare in lockdown more opportunities for experimentation than most other plays. This article is the first in a series in which I will track the ways these lockdown Dreams create both the play’s distinct worlds and the characters which inhabit them. I’ll particularly focus on what, to me, is proving most successful in doing so using the filmic, theatrical and technological screen language of lockdown that’s emerged in the past few months.
Live online productions of Dream have varied in their distinction between the human and supernatural worlds of the play. TSMGO’s production offered a good example of the more straightforward choices being made. Rob Myles’s project began life very much as a series of online play readings: his inaugural production on 19 March of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, for example, offered little in terms of setting, costume or props and largely let both the text and the actors’ performances alone create the world of the play. Fast-forwarding to their Dream eleven weeks later, the play-reading style is still evidenced through voiceover providing act and scene numbers, as well as stage directions indicating shifts in setting. But TSMGO’s Dream also showed how simple prop and costuming choices have increasingly been incorporated into Myles’s productions. The court of Athens was characterised by modern dress and homes, with the nobles’ settings offering a nod perhaps to the trope of bookshelves increasingly appearing in the background of Zoom calls — documented in tongue-in-cheek fashion on social media through accounts such as ‘Bookcase Credibility’.² Whilst Sarah Peachey’s voiceover let us know that we’d shifted to ‘the woods near Athens’ at the start of Act 2, the change in setting was also marked by the costuming of Oberon (Andrew Mockley), Titania (Natalie Boakye), Puck (Katrina Allen) and the fairies, as well as the presence of flora and fairy lights situated behind the characters. It was a simple but satisfying shift, carried through nicely (if not entirely consistently) as the mortals entered the woods — those playing the mechanicals, for example, had all brought foliage into view for their rehearsal of Pyramus and Thisbe in Act 3 Scene 1. Notably, whilst plants appeared in the setting for anyone in the woods, only the magical characters used fairy lights, distinguishing their supernaturality further.
I described TSMGO’s style of live online performance as ‘not just necessarily low-tech but consciously so’ in my article exploring their production of Ian Doescher’s William Shakespeare’s Star Wars. It’s a description which also applies to their Dream, and Myles’s chronological series of adaptations as a whole, as well as those productions which have followed a similar approach to TSMGO. 60 Hour Shakespeare used Zoom backgrounds throughout their A Midsummer Night’s Stream, choosing an etheral forest image for the scenes set in the woods and including some relatively elaborate plant-themed costumes and props for the fairies. In ATC’s Dream, meanwhile, Puck (Anna Faye Lieberman) constructed her own night sky background during her first appearance, conscientiously hanging fairy light stars and a paper plate moon to the tune of Dana Liu’s flute-playing fairy. It was a lovely touch which reminded me in particular of the picturebook sincerity of the films of Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson. I previously noted TSMGO in particular can be considered ‘metamodern in its approach’ to performing Shakespeare online. Moments such as Puck’s overt construction of his world during ATC’s Dream — drawing attention to the production’s inherently artificial and unsophisticated nature, but in a way that is earnest and committed to its childlike innocence — suggest that the metamodern sensibility is perhaps something to be found more widely in live online performance during lockdown.
Whilst these productions are necessarily and even purposefully simplistic, they also feel limited in how far we can buy into their magic. Whilst TSMGO occasionally exploited Zoom’s ‘green screen’ functionality to make Oberon and Puck ‘invisible’, this felt more like a nod to their other-worldly status than an attempt to genuinely create a sense of magic. In contrast, The Back Room Shakespeare Project’s (BRSP) Dream offers a good example of how contemporary technology can be used to give an effective sense of the play’s supernatural elements. The production is not a live performance but a film produced and edited together from footage of the actors filming themselves in isolation, so to assess it using the same criteria as the live online performances discussed elsewhere in this article would be unfair. However, BRSP’s Dream is overtly set within our current locked down world, consciously capturing and framing the cast’s performances using Zoom, FaceTime, Instagram and various other technologies that have become the only way for people to connect over long distances since March — and which have also become key to online performances. Whilst the nobles, lovers and mechanicals use these technologies to communicate, the supernatural characters take them further by ‘magically’ altering their appearance using animated camera filters, an ability the humans notably don’t have. Puck’s (Nick Harazin) excessive use of Snapchat-style filters in particular — often changing his appearance several times during a single speech — positions him both as the mischievous ‘merry wanderer of the night’ (2.1.43) and as a shapeshifting spirit with magical powers not shared by the mortal characters.
Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s lived online performance of Midsummer Night Stream — to my mind the best example of Dream performed in lockdown so far — combined these two approaches to brilliant effect. Like BRSP’s production, director Sid Phoenix placed Stream in our current world: the actors not only performed through Zoom, but the characters they played also overtly communicated using the software throughout. The visual distinction between the human and fairy realms was more subtle than in TSMGO, for example, but was again created through the use of light — such as Puck’s (Phoenix) multiple lamps, Oberon’s (David Alwyn) string of pink fairy lights, or Titania’s (Rachel Waring) purple bedside lamps. Again like the fairies in Back Room’s Dream, Phoenix also allowed his supernatural characters to manipulate technology in ways that the humans couldn’t, making them appear to traverse the barriers of telecommunication by breaking the Zoom wall. Admittedly this was in part facilitated by some of the actors being isolated in the same place as each other — allowing Puck to transform Bottom (Joanna Brown) by briefly sneaking into her Zoom window, for example. But by using his ability to do this sparingly, Phoenix authentically created what Gemma described in her article on the production as ‘moment[s] so brief as to appear magical’.
Bottom’s transformation in Stream through a pair of ears alone — a choice reminiscent of Hammed Animashaun’s Bottom at the Bridge Theatre in London in 2019 — was far more low-tech than the camera filters employed by BRSP, and indeed by Rob Myles in TSMGO’s Dream, in creating their respective donkey-headed versions of the character (the latter in particular is a choice I will discuss further in my next article). It also links Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s production to the metamodern sensibility discussed earlier — simultaneously drawing attention to, and sincerely committing to, the inherent roughness of the live online performance model. This arguably extended to the production’s presentation of the supernatural, offering the most authentically magical Dream seen in lockdown so far thanks to Phoenix’s dedication to placing his production in a recognisable version of our current world, and adhering to the rules and restrictions of that world so fastidiously elsewhere in his production. By doing so, the abilities of his fairies to break these rules creates a true sense of enchantment; whilst the audience can objectively see how the moment was created, just as in any powerful piece of theatre they choose to believe in the world that has been created. To paraphrase Clarke once again, in that moment, technology became indistinguishable from magic.
In my second article on ‘Lockdown Dreams’, I’ll focus on the ways the productions that have been performed and released so far have attempted to bring the young lovers to life in adaptation and performance, and will again explore how effectively technology has been used to do this.
