Lockdown Shakespeare

New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation

Gemma Kate Allred, Benjamin Broadribb, Erin Sullivan, Mark Thornton Burnett

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350247840
• eBook ISBN: 9781350247819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama

This edited collection offers the first in-depth analysis and sourcebook for 'Lockdown Shakespeare'. It brings together scholars of stage, screen, early modern and adaptation studies to examine the work that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic and considers issues of form, liveness, reception, presence and community. Interviews with theatre makers and artists illuminate the challenges and benefits of creating new work online, while educators consider how digital tools have facilitated the teaching of Shakespeare through performance. Together, the chapters in this book offer readers the definitive work on the performance and adaptation of Shakespeare online during the pandemic. From The Show Must Go Online, which presented Shakespeare's First Folio via YouTube, to Creation Theatre and Big Telly's interactive The Tempest and Macbeth, which used Zoom as their stage, the book documents the variety and richness of work that emerged during the pandemic. It reveals how, by taking Shakespeare online in new and innovative ways, the theatre industry sparked the evolution of new forms of performance with their own conventions, aesthetics and notions of liveness. Among the other productions discussed are Arden Theatre Company's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Tender Claws' 'The Under Presents: Tempest', The Shakespeare Ensemble's What You Will, Merced Shakespearefest's Ricardo II, CtrlAltRepeat's Midsummer Night Stream, Sally McLean's Shakespeare Republic: #AllTheWebsAStage (The Lockdown Chronicles) and Justina Taft Mattos's Moore – A Pacific Island Othello.

PART ONE

Analyses

1

The Screen Language of Lockdown: Connection and Choice in Split-Screen Performance

John Wyver

The first signs of a significant shift in the screen language of performance appeared soon after the start of the first Covid-19 lockdowns in Britain and elsewhere in mid-March 2020. Responding to the enforced closure of auditoria and the consequent loss of revenue, theatre and dance companies, orchestras and solo performers needed to find new ways of remaining in touch with their audiences. With broadcast television available to only a few organizations, social media and other online channels were quickly embraced.

One of the earliest examples of a new approach to online performance was the presentation of part of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony from Rotterdams Philharmonisch Orkest (‘From us, for you’ 2020). Introductions self-shot by players on their smartphones were followed by rapidly edited reflections about innovating to remain connected. ‘Because if we do it together,’ one of the musicians explained (in Dutch), before the frame fragmented into twelve headshots on a four-by-three grid as the whole group said, ‘we’ll succeed.’ Single shots alternated with multiple shots in split-screen configurations. Increasingly complex visual patterns dominated the remainder of the four-minute arrangement until an unseen choir crashed in over a final eighteen-image irregular array. Released on 20 March 2020, the recording rapidly clocked up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and other platforms. A host of musical variants followed with musicians recording at home alone to a click track to keep time before being digitally edited together. Dancers soon followed with the Ballet de l’Opéra national de Paris collaborating with filmmaker Cédric Klapisch to express their thanks to frontline medical workers (‘Dire merci’ 2020). Fragments of rehearsal and performance were edited to the ‘Dance of the Knights’ section of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare’s drama of love, forced separation and loss, adapted as a ballet in Soviet Russia, was now reimagined as a visual tale of forced separation and hope. In the final moments, two dancers apparently in separate spaces and screens came together in a single frame where, presumably in their bubble, they embraced.

What these early lockdown performances and many others shared in filmic terms was a visual language of split screens: multiple moving images displayed simultaneously within the overall frame of the work. Similar split-screen visuals were at the same moment becoming familiar with the rapid take-up of video conferencing software for both professional and personal exchanges. Producers of screen drama quickly saw the potential of Zoom both as a production tool and as a conceptual framework for performance (see Turk 2020). The webisode ‘Initial Lockdown Meeting’ of BBC Television’s comedy series W1A (dir. Morton 2020) was an early, recorded example of a Zoom call as a narrative device, and a similar idea was successfully developed in the comedy series Staged (dir. Evans 2020–1) with David Tennant and Michael Sheen. Theatre companies similarly began to explore the split-screen space of Zoom as a performance arena, including for live presentations, as in The Tempest co-produced by Creation Theatre and Big Telly (see Allred Chapter 3; Aebischer and Nicholas Chapter 4; Part Three).

The rapid take-up and subsequent ubiquity of the language of split screens for online performance has obscured just how radical a break this widespread usage is from the previously dominant screen language employed for almost all theatre, dance and classical music. ‘Event cinema’ broadcasts in the past decade, including Met Opera Live in HD, NTLive and others, have almost without exception used sequences of full-frame shots, as have countless examples, including the vast majority of Shakespeare productions drawn from stage presentations, across nearly a century of screen performance. Shots filling the frame are sequenced either live or in post-production editing to reveal interactions occurring within a real-world space. In contrast, with traditional production methods closed off in the spring of 2020, variants of a split-screen aesthetic were quickly established. Such was the prevalence of split-screen usage that this visual form emerged as the screen language of lockdown for digital performance.

Although this chapter may seem somewhat anomalous in a collection dedicated primarily to Shakespeare on screens during lockdown, it aims to explore the history and aesthetics of an alternative screen language to that of the tradition of screened Shakespeare performance. Developing from an initial discussion of the previously dominant sequential montage language of performance, it highlights precursors of split-screen language and considers the implications and possible meanings of this visual approach in the context of online theatre generally, especially in relation to ideas of connection and choice for the viewer. While it does not focus on extended experiments with split-screen language in Shakespeare performance in the past, it begins to apply its ideas to lockdown productions, and it is hoped that this offers some productive ideas for the more detailed discussions in subsequent chapters. Concluding remarks consider how the break that split screens represent for the dominant form of screen performance may impact on theatre and on the production of screen Shakespeare as cultural organizations emerge from the constraints of lockdown.

Breaking the frame

‘Through most of the cinematic century,’ Anne Friedberg has written, ‘the dominant form for the moving image was, with striking consistency, a single image in a single frame.’ Film extended the deep-seated understanding in Western systems of representation of the frame as a window into a world beyond. Friedberg has traced this metaphor back to the 1435 treatise on painting and perspective by Leon Battista Alberti, who ‘famously instructed the painter to “regard” the rectangular frame of the painting as an open window’ (2006: 1). Naturalized long before the cinema, and despite challenges by visual artists including Picasso and Braque in the early twentieth century, this conception of the frame was unquestioningly adopted by almost all film-makers. Nonetheless, Barry Salt has noted that alternatives in the form of split screens can be found in films as early as 1902 (1983: 72–3). Often associated with dreams or fantasy scenes, split screens were also used to visualize the mediated connection between two parties using the telephone, including in Suspense (1913), a drama directed by Phillips Smalley and Lois Weber. In Holger-Madsen’s Danish drama Balletens Datter (1913) two characters speaking by phone are framed within oval vignettes on either side of a shot showing an elevated distant view of a modern metropolis. A better-known and more spectacular example of split screens from the silent period is the final reel of Abel Gance’s epic Napoléon (1927) for which the director used the Polyvision process to film and project three images side by side.

Such split-screen sequences are examples of what the theorist Lev Manovich has defined as spatial montage, in which multiple images, often of different sizes and proportions, are juxtaposed on a screen at the same time. ‘This juxtaposition by itself,’ Manovich has noted, ‘of course does not result in montage; it is up to the filmmaker to construct a logic that determines which images appear together, when they appear, and what kind of relationships they enter into with one another’ (2001: 322). Spatial montage contrasts with the traditional temporal montage of cinema, whether in its deployment as the continuity editing of classical Hollywood cinema or in the more radical work of Soviet filmmakers, most notably Sergei Eisenstein. Employed in almost all film and television, including screen performance, temporal montage creates meaning from the sequencing of individual shots. Conjunctions and disjunctions across edits develop or disturb an unfolding narrative. By bringing together images often filmed non-continuously and in different real-world places, temporal montage creates recognizable space in time.

Employed most often as an attention-attracting special effect, spatial montage has had only a marginal presence in mainstream drama. A notable example from Hollywood in the 1950s is the ‘Once Upon a Time’ number from MGM’s musical It’s Always Fair Weather (dirs. Kelly and Donen 1955), in which Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey and Michael Kidd, each in a different space, appear to dance side by side on screen. Michael Gordon’s 1959 comedy Pillow Talk features a lightly eroticized mediatized conversation in a manner similar to Suspense nearly a half-century before. Here the characters played by Doris Day and Rock Hudson speak together on the phone while taking baths in their separate apartments. As they commune in telephonic space, their feet ‘touch’ across the boundary of the split-screen visualization. Such sequences have been understood by critics as a response to the apparent threat to the movies posed by television, an idea which is echoed in the more explicitly satirical presentation of the new medium in It’s Always Fair Weather. In both cases, the spectacle of CinemaScope and Eastmancolor is complemented by special effects split-screening to demonstrate the visual and narrative pleasures the low-res, mostly monochrome domestic medium could not aspire to deliver. More than sixty years later, during lockdown in 2020, American musical theatre stars Katheryne Penny and Nathan Lucrezio demonstrated the easy availability via mobile phones and tablets of production techniques that were complex and expensive in 1950s Hollywood by posting to Facebook a home-produced video employing exactly the ‘Once Upon a Time’ technique (Falls Patio Players 2020).

A decade after It’s Always Fair Weather, a group of mainstream films also made extensive use of split screens, including John Frankenheimer’s motor racing drama Grand Prix (1966), the heist film The Thomas Crown Affair (dir. Jewison 1968), the serial-killer narrative The Boston Strangler (dir. Fleischer 1969), the festival documentary Woodstock (dir. Wadleigh 1970) and George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973). Jim Bizzocchi proposed that the split screens of this moment were a response to the vibrancy of youth culture, and most notably the centrality of pop and rock music. Split-screen sequences in the majority of these films were prominently associated with music, which supports Bizzocchi’s proposal of the split screen as ‘a cinematic attraction that was capable of “blowing the minds” and capturing the attention of a youth culture comfortable with expanded consciousness and oriented towards the visceral pleasures of the sensorium’ (2009: 7). And while Grand Prix does not have an explicit address to a younger audience, its multiplied images, serial repetitions and near-abstract patterning across inset windows, coupled with the intense soundtrack, illustrate how split screens can suggest the heightened perceptions of immersive involvement in a sports context. Here too there is a direct engagement with ‘the visceral pleasures of the sensorium’.

More than fifty years later, split screens, music and youth culture are once again brought together, this time with a strong participatory component, in the Duets function on TikTok. This facilitates a user recording their own video alongside an original, with the new recording being posted most often in the left-hand panel of a split screen. Initially introduced in 2017 as a way of users singing along with friends or responding as fans to well-known musicians, the function’s potential for developing connections has, according to Alexis Bondy, ‘created a unique capacity for community building, meaningful interactions, and support’ (2020). TikTok saw what the trade magazine Variety described as ‘meteoric’ growth in 2020 with more than 100 million users across the world during lockdown and with rapidly increasing multi-generational use (Littleton 2020) (see Part Three).

Liberating the eye

Split screens faded from prominence in mainstream movies of the later 1970s, not least because of the complexity and expense of the optical printing techniques required to create them. But the availability of digital post-production methods at the turn of this century facilitated a number of independent films employing the device prominently, including work by Peter Greenaway and several features directed by Mike Figgis. Greenaway’s most extended exploration to date is his digital film The Pillow Book (1996), although prior to this the director had used split screens, composite and overlapping images, and the collision of multiple visual and aural sources in his work for broadcast television, most notably in A TV Dante (co-created with Tom Phillips, 1990, Channel 4). The visualization of the first eight cantos of the Divine Comedy was supplemented by commentators who appeared in inset split-screen frames in a form of footnotes. In The Pillow Book, Greenaway conjured up an even more complex text, as Benedict Morrison has proposed:

[T]he film’s form plays with both structure and meaning through a sustained use of layered frames: multiple frames coincide and compete, some eclipsing others. These complex mosaics – which make use of digital technologies to create intermedial collisions between images, texts, and sounds – transform the familiar sequential and sutured structures of narrative film editing into collages that are defined, instead, by complex simultaneity.

(2020: 1)

Figgis’s sustained engagement with split screens began in Miss Julie (1999), elements of which he shot with two cameras running simultaneously. In post-production, a recently introduced digital editing system showed the two shots side by side, and Figgis displayed them in this way in an extended sequence of the final film. As he said: ‘The eye was suddenly liberated, you weren’t just a prisoner of the edit’ (‘Evolution of Split-Screen’ 2021). In Timecode (2000), Figgis developed the possibilities of the visual language of split screens by running four stories simultaneously in real time in screen quadrants, a technique made possible not only by digital editing but also by the use of exceptionally lengthy, uninterrupted takes. These too were now achievable thanks to the recording capacities of new digital cameras. Figgis planned and choreographed his shoot so as to coordinate significant narrative events achieving prominence at particular moments in one or other of the frames. The eye may be liberated to roam across the four channels, but attention is directed by specific visual cues and also by the audio privileging significant elements. Figgis spoke of Timecode and of this narrative technique as a kind of fugue (ibid.). He also stressed the influence on these films of his work with live performance, not least in their use of uninterrupted takes, and also of theatre productions by the Wooster Group, which have often matched staged action with film or television recordings run on monitors set within the playing area. Figgis continued his split-screen experiments in Hotel (2002), a comedy drama about a British film crew shooting a screen version of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi in Venice. One split-screen sequence features a night journey by gondola through Venice, the film’s director getting medical attention after being shot, and a performance of Schubert’s lied ‘Der Doppelgänger.’

In the two decades since Figgis’s experiments, split screens have...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• Glossary
• Introduction: Cultural Cartography of the Digital Lockdown Landscape
• Part One: Analyses
• Part Two: Case Studies
• Part Three
• Conclusion: Shakespeare after Lockdown
• Index
• Imprint