The medium is the message, writes
PETER CRAWLEY
IT SEEMS quaint now, but six years ago a colleague wrote approvingly of Ioanna Anderson's play, Words of Advice for Young People, that it was first time she had seen a character send a text message.
Given how important communication is in drama, where characters send their love, warnings and essential information to the wrong people at the wrong time, this decade-long lag between a new and improved technology and its panting arrival to the stage seems either suspicious or entirely understandable. In matters of communication technology, theatre didn't seem like an early adopter.
How things have changed. Australian company Chamber Made Opera has announced plans for what it hopes will be the first opera designed specifically for an iPad. A few weeks ago, the Royal Shakespeare Company migrated some of its content to Twitter, staging - if that's still the word - Romeo and Julietas an updated, real-time, six-week-long event called Such Tweet Sorrow.
Believing that the endlessly adaptable star-crossed lovers could just as easily move to cross-platform performance, the RSC quickly found the limits of plot contrivances and technological transposition. While the original tragedy is brought about by a terrible failure to communicate a conspiracy of unknown whereabouts and a woefully inefficient postal service, the Twitter version demands that Romeo leave his phone off for a couple of days.
Something more genuinely interactive happened when Dutch company Toneelgroep Amsterdam incorporated social media into
The Roman Tragedies, a six-hour version of Coriolanus, Julius Caesarand Anthony and Cleopatra. Audience observed the action from sofas onstage and tweeted comments, which were relayed via a rolling news tickertape. It took the natural condition of social media and made it the substance of theatre: everyone is now a watcher, a performer and a reviewer.
A few Irish theatre makers have used the logic of new technology. Brokentalkers notably used a live video call to Ghent for In Real Time, which probed long-distance relationships and whether broadband can ever supply us with a secure connection.
Pan Pan's The Crumb Trailsuggested, by splitting its action between YouTube videos, multimedia freakouts and Skype calls, that contemporary experience and performance itself could be permanently fractured, and we had to follow the clues back to meaning. And right now Bernard Farrell is using Skype as a plot device in his cosy Abbey comedy Bookworms.
Nothing dates quicker than the latest fad, however, which is why the first play to feature a camera phone now feels faintly like a period piece. As blogs beget status updates, Bebo slips out of memory and Twitter begins to feel so 2008, each digital revolution is eclipsed by the next.
New media are not necessarily here to stay, but their desire for immediate connection is. If theatre stays alive to that lesson, absorbing new platforms, it will always get the message.
