Together in electric dreams

As high summer approaches, Stratford-upon-Avon is packed with people on the Shakespeare trail. Thousands descend on the small town every day, eager to discover more about the Bard and, if they’re lucky, get a seat at one of the productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The company, of course, acknowledges this and with Midsummer Night’s Dreaming, it has enlisted Google to help bring Shakespeare to the Internet - in a variety of forms and experiences.

Written in the 1590s, A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains one of William Shakespeare’s most popular plays, and the RSC is celebrating its 40th production. The challenge - and opportunity - is to place such enduring, celebrated works into new and more contemporary contexts in order to engage with increasingly diverse, developing audiences. If Shakespeare’s writing continues to allow us to ask questions about the world, then it’s right that we answer back in a way which is reflective of now, rather than the sixteenth century.

This is not the first production from the RSC to focus on the Internet as a platform for performance. Such Tweet Sorrow re-imagined Romeo and Juliet through Twitter. MyShakespeare, a suite of re-interpretative works for the 2012 Festival, included Spirits Melted Into Air by Tom Armitage, which transformed on-stage movement into sculpture.

Now it’s the turn of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The collaboration between Google and the RSC started from relatively simple ideas - turning a few lines of the work into a multimedia performance. But, as lovers of Shakespeare may well testify, it’s so difficult to focus on just a few choice lines when there are so many other riches available. With that in mind, Google’s Tom Uglow and the RSC’s Geraldine Collinge set to work on the whole play, developing an onion skin-like approach where the corpus remained at the core but surrounded by a diverse range of online performances and media.

What both Collinge and Uglow are happy to admit is that they are learning as they go. They are quick to explain that Midsummer Night’s Dreaming isn’t a fixed performance in time; there are so many technical and dramatic interdependencies that the only way to discover how it will all work is during the performance itself. And it’s the performance which has been really disassembled and given the “onion skin” approach: taking place across different days, times and online locations, the audience is not invited to simply sit for two hours and absorb - they have to be online, in different places at different times, in order to experience the full impact of what this is all about. As Collinge says, if the play gives the audience a new set of realities then it’s a great vehicle for experimentation.

“We talked about working on a few plays, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about appearance, reality, and imagination and the relationship between the audience and actors on stage - it’s the ultimate play of the imagination. You go into a different world. It felt to us that what we wanted to do, thinking about the Internet and how we communicate now, was replicated in the play, and what Shakespeare had done in the play was to take people into a different world and how it changed how you communicate. It felt like the right play to experiment with.”

The team have taken the play’s references to time and, in this version, made them real. So, when Quince says to Bottom “And I am to entreat you, request you, and desire you to con them by tomorrow night and meet me in the palace wood, a mile without the town, by moonlight,” then moonlight is indeed when this meeting will take place.

Directed by Gregory Doran, the first part of the performance happens at 8pm on midsummer night itself, with the second scheduled to take place at 2am on Sunday morning, performed from the RSC’s Ashcroft Room. To fully realise the possibilities of a multi-layered world to the spectator, a degree of commitment is also required on their part.

Another aspect of Midsummer Night’s Dreaming is the extension of the story world through playing with the volume and diversity of available characters. The infinite, horizonless space of the Internet allows a much greater depth both to characters that historically would have operated on the perimeter, and to main characters whose impact can be more effectively realised. The marriage of Theseus of Athens to Hippolyta - itself set both in the woods and in an alternative fairy world - is reported in The Nightly Herald, a daily online newspaper developed for the play. As Uglow says, these additional elements can help to tell the story through an incidental, “glimpsed” way that can add relevance without distracting from the plot.

“If you were creating narratives now, then this would be a very interesting way to tell stories, We all get a glimpse at aspects of the story. That’s the digital world of the play. We’re also wide open to the fact that this stage doesn’t have edges and you can’t stop people from joining in. We’re embracing that as well. We were really interested in what happens when you take a story that we know and love and remains true and has integrity, but we see that story through [digital] devices, media channels, and through other people who are there and have a vested interest… and how they see the stories.”

The delivery platform for much of the play is Google+ which has been used in advance of the performance to offer live Hangout sessions with its actors. The character of Puck, a jester-like elf, has also been given life, adding comments and opinions to any site or page that takes his fancy. As the only character that has been allowed to step outside of the play, the audience can interact - chat, joke, even argue - with him, wherever he chooses to be at the time. This opportunity for real-time dialogue opens up all sorts of possibilities in terms of where the audience might want to take the play themselves.

Of course, the danger is that re-imagining work such as this might upset those that see the play as a fixed piece in time - something that can’t change. However, for the RSC to maintain the relevance of Shakespeare - and itself - his works should be open to wide and diverse interpretations. The enduring nature of Shakespeare’s characters, dialogue, and fictional worlds is entirely because we see the opportunity in how they might relate to our contemporary lives. The first encounter Doran, the director, had with the play was listening to a vinyl recording; a simple but effective example of how contemporary media can aid, rather than hinder, discovery.

“It strikes me that we’re using new [media] technology to introduce Shakespeare to a generation in a way that they understand, rather than forcing them to sit and listen,” says Uglow. “You don’t need to watch the whole play to appreciate some incredibly profound moments of poetry.”

Collinge and Uglow seem to have pitched their pragmatic enthusiasm correctly: they acknowledge that this is a venture which sometimes sails into unchartered territory, but they fully intend to experience the excitement of going there - and are keen to take the audience with them. It’s a journey for all of us, and one which, over high summer, many of us will be delighted to take.

Geraldine Collinge is Director of Events and Exhibitions at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Tom Uglow is Creative Director of Google Creative Lab.

Midsummer Night’s Dreaming starts on 21/06/13 at dream40.org.