Lockdown Liveness through Social Media in Fresh Life Theatre’s Helena: Ugly as a Bear
The stark future of the theatre industry was drawn into sharp focus this week with news that Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre amongst others is at risk of insolvency as the impact of Covid-19 continues to take its toll. However, there has been less press coverage of the many small touring and festival productions that are equally being impacted. As we have noted over the past few weeks, creatives are responding to this crisis with imagination. Fresh Life Theatre were due to tour A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Shakespearean Tragedy, including an appearance at the Bristol Shakespeare Festival. Rather than shelve the project, the Bristol-based theatre company has reworked their ‘would’ve been show’ into two made-for-YouTube productions following Helena and Hermia’s journey through the forests of Dream.
The first part, Helena: Ugly as a Bear, premiered 22 May 2020 with Hermia: Heaven Unto Hell to follow on 5 June 2020. The concept corresponds to that of other lockdown Shakespeare: actors in isolation rehearse over Zoom and stream the production to YouTube. Where Fresh Life Theatre’s approach differed is that the production was pre-recorded on smart phones and then the individual videos were edited together to create the play. The ‘live streamed’ element was brought in via Twitter, where the actors live-tweeted the production in character, interacting directly with the audience. This is closer to a screen adaptation than a theatre production, however, with references to ‘live streams’ and ‘premieres’ coupled with the live tweeting created the sense of the one-off event.
Running at thirty minutes, Helena: Ugly as a Bear is a heavily cut version of Shakespeare’s play — it has to be! We open not with Dream but rather the first five lines of Hamlet’s Act 3 Scene 2 soliloquy spoken by Aaron May’s Puck in extreme close-up — ‘’Tis now the very witching time of night…’ — disturbed not by Gertrude, but by Helena (Annina Watton) and Hermia’s (Myra Lee Bell) pre-Athens departure chat. Gone is any discussion of forced marriage or nunneries. Gone too are the framing devices of Theseus/Hippolyta and Titania/Oberon to provide a bridge between the mortal world and fairy realm. Instead we have a thoroughly modern set of lovers acting not under duress but through choice in a complicated mesh of unrequited love. Hermia and Lysander’s (George Goodman) escape is more a device to disentangle themselves from Demetrius (Maddy Parkes) than anything more forced.
In the absence of Oberon, Puck acts with agency and with little more motivation than malevolent manipulation — there is no sense of an overarching masterplan, more a desire to meddle, the allusion to Hamlet adding a hint of misogyny to his actions. Absent too is any real focus on Lysander and Demetrius’s motivations other than a need to follow Hermia (and then, while under Puck’s control, Helena) wherever she will go. In a very of-the-Zeitgeist approach, Charlie Day’s production clearly seeks to refocus the gaze onto Helena and Hermia, the male lovers seeming somewhat surplus to requirements, offering little to the plot. Certainly, it is unclear what, if anything, these somewhat flimsy men can offer the feisty female partnership. Absent the mechanicals, or indeed any of the comedy of Dream, the production was the ‘darker take’ the theatre company promised — albeit the risk posed was not the threat of sexual violence that lurks beneath the surface of traditional productions of Dream, rather the implication that these young lovers are at the mercy of a motiveless malevolent spirit.
Filmed in advance, rather than subjected to the high-risk stakes of a live Zoom stream, it was perhaps a little disappointing that the Blair Witch style filming of the trailer wasn’t carried through. Rather than take advantage of the pre-recording to place actors ‘on location’ (perhaps alone in their gardens or the local park) we were treated to a series of dimly lit scenes in cupboards under the stairs. I never really got the sense we were in the forest. There were nice touches made through filming choices which brought the actors performing in isolation together. Day’s direction saw the taller Helena filmed from below offering a sense of her ‘tall personage’ whereas the ‘little’ Hermia was filmed from above always looking up at the camera. Similarly, shot in extreme close-up, Puck was never more than a blurred, dimly lit face, his sense of ethereal otherness made clear. I was struck again by how Shakespeare’s words alone are not enough to carry the four-way lovers fight in Act 3 Scene 2. As I noted in respect of Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s Midsummer Night Stream, ‘one of the joys of that scene in performance is the over-the-top demonstrative fighting between the love-drugged Lysander and Demetrius coupled with the usually exaggerated reactions of Helena and Hermia’. Again, this scene lost impetus when the actors are clearly safe at home rather than fumbling in the forest.
Notions of liveness are key to the lockdown Shakespeare debate and while this production wasn’t acted ‘live’, a sense of uniqueness was injected through the live Twitter feed. Those watching the premiere were rewarded with the one-off opportunity to interact with characters as the production developed. As a huge fan of a GIF, I enthusiastically responded to the characters somewhat self-absorbed expressions of sexual attraction, loss, despair or confusion. Responding to Helena’s taunt of Hermia’s small stature ‘LOW LOW LOW LOW LOW #HermiaisLOW’ I posted a GIF quoting Flo Rida’s ‘Shawty got low’ — much to Hermia’s consternation: ‘“Shawty?” Um, excuse me’. Whereas the production used Shakespeare’s language, the Twitter feed acted as a modern language translation, offering often ‘NSFW’ insights into a character’s inner thoughts. It was here that the male lovers had more scope for character development and arguably where the more sinister aspects of the love-drug conceit played out, as questions of love versus sex were brought to the fore.
However, it was in Helena’s tweets that the impact of Puck’s game were most poignant. After the production ended the characters sought clarification and explanation — ‘#possession?’ tweeted Hermia, ‘That was one bad trip’ suggested Lysander. However, Helena’s tweets were more problematic — ‘I can forgive… but I’m not sure I can forget’, she mused, adding she felt ‘humiliated’ and ‘uncomfortable’. Alongside the highly sexualised Twitter comments of Lysander and Demetrius, her subdued confused responses are emblematic of the darker side of social media. Without the play’s dominant social demands in the form of Theseus and Egeus’s decrees, social media takes that place — it was hard to read the Twitter feed as anything other than a commentary of the pressures young women face purely for being female on the internet. It is a pressure typified by Puck’s response to the play’s title quote that was ripe with his Hamlet-esque belittlement of women:
The live-tweeting acted as a paratextual device informing and shaping my reading of the production. However, it was not without its drawbacks. By encouraging me to follow the Twitter feed alongside the production, my attention was divided — split between the YouTube stream and Twitter, between my computer and phone screens. The ding of a response regularly took my attention out of the play and into the search for a perfect GIF. This may have been intentional; at times I was as lost as Hermia searching for Lysander in the forest, my existing knowledge of the play often the hook I needed to keep up. The nature of the Twitter feed has the secondary effect of creating dissonance and undermining the world of the play. The actors were simultaneously tweeting and acting — I was both watching them in the moment and reading their response to it. At times this was jarring, as was the language — hearing the actors speaking in the verse of the 1500s but reacting in the social media shorthand of 2020 created an anachronicity that at times resulted in a cognitive dissonance.
This production is very much of the moment. As theatre moves online and the watch party becomes ubiquitous, audience attention is rarely fully on the play. Where Fresh Life Theatre have been particularly ingenious is capitalising on that — they controlled my inattention. They gave me an acceptable outlet for my distraction. I was waylaid into insulting Puck, calling out Demetrius and Lysander’s over-sexualised responses. I may not have been giving the filmed production my undivided attention, but I was engaged with it. Much truncated, this was never going to be the perfect Dream: however, it was a fun thirty minutes. It is only in retrospect that the darker aspects of the Twitter feed became clearer. I didn’t respond to Helena’s tweets, I didn’t offer words of advice or support. As I joined in mocking with the characters, was I just as bad? Am I too part of the problem?
I am intrigued by what the second part of the production will offer — Helena and Hermia’s stories are so intertwined it will be interesting to see how Fresh Life Theatre differentiate the two women. But I’ll have to wait until 5 June for Hermia: Heaven Unto Hell to find out!
