At the start of Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre, W.B. Worthen notes that in the 21st century, productions of Shakespeare have proven “an unusually rich site for thinking through the impact of theatrical technicity” (11). Several high-profile productions in Europe and North America attest to the degree to which technology and technological concerns have been integrated into contemporary productions of early modern plays, productions predicated on technological experimentation with live video feeds, motion capture technology, and algorithms. Meanwhile, the relationship between performances of Shakespeare and their audiences has been transformed by the expansion of live broadcasts to cinemas or livestreaming online and by the rise of social media, which has opened new platforms for performance and audience engagement. Productions that do not inhabit virtual spaces often still take their cues from the digital world that surrounds us by emphasizing immersion and interactivity. Into this milieu we might also add the rise of productions based in so-called Original Practices (OP), or staged in reconstructed early modern theatres — a reciprocal gesture to the turn towards electronic technologies, in Worthen’s estimation (27), and a co-traveler with immersive and site-specific theatre, as Pascale Aebischer highlights in Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance (35).

In their respective books, Aebischer and Worthen take stock of this crowded field, providing overlapping studies of recent transformations of the technology that the stage has always been. Worthen argues that the theatre has always used and represented technology to enact “the convertibility of who and what” (29), as a face becomes a mask or a script becomes embodied. Confronted with this convertibility at the theatre, we also encounter the ideologies and structures that determine the technological affordances in use and on display. Aebischer’s book centers on the spectator emplaced in three interrelated modes of technologically mediated spectatorship that “enable the re-activation” of performer-audience relations that characterized the early modern playhouse (2). This re-activation is neither nostalgic nor idealized, but requires an ethical spectatorship in which one takes responsibility for looking.

Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre begins not with Shakespeare, but with Samuel Beckett, whose plays make clear that “Theatre is always about its tekhnē” (2). Worthen draws on the work of Bernard Stiegler to emphasize not theatre technology, but the technicity of theatre: “theatre as an industrialized concatenation of instruments of recording and displaying, of self-construction and world-construction, of mimicry and memory asserting a specifically technologized regime of action” (27). From this perspective, the acting of a performer and the incorporation of live video feeds share even footing as technologies of theatre, each always already a mediation remediated on the stage. The five chapters that follow are organized around one or more key terms: interface, application/device, interactivity, immersion, and algorithm/code.

Some of theatre’s pre–21st century technologies — namely acting, writing, and architecture — appear throughout. The book’s second chapter introduces acting as technology in the figure of the actor’s face as it is remediated in live video feeds projected in three productions: Thomas Ostermeier’s Hamlet (2008) at the Berlin Schaubühne, The Wooster Group’s Hamlet (2005–2013), and Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s Roman Tragedies (2007–present). Drawing on the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, but “read[ing] Levinas against himself,” Worthen mines the ethical meditation opened up in the theatre as the face proliferates as a series of interfaces — the actor’s visage, the mask, the technologized face now on a screen — that “remediates the gestural complex of social life” (49). Chapter 3 takes up writing and the script as another performance technology, tracing its operations in analog and digital manifestations — from Paper Theater’s “Postcard Plays” (2006) to smartphone and tablet apps, some designed for the student of Shakespeare, others for the professional actor. Worthen elaborates a complex and nuanced sense of the interplay between text, performance, and embodiment in theatrical performance. The technology of acting returns in a comparison between apps used by actors to prepare for auditions and rehearse roles, and the cue-script scrolls used by actors rehearsing for Original Practices productions. These presage the focus of chapter 4, which takes “the discourse of OP as a contemporary theatre technology” (106), one “designed to remediate early modern practices, not recover them” (109). Chapter 4’s emphasis on interactivity (the “liberated function [OP] ascribes to its spectator” [113]) goes hand-in-hand with chapter 5, which investigates the technology of immersion via Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (2011–present). In both cases ideology works on and through theatrical architectures that lay discursive claim to democracy, license, and freedom, despite being embedded in structures that impose limits on all three. “Shared light” OP performances (which do not use modern sound and light rigging and illuminate audience and performers with the same light) paper over early-modern and 21st-century hierarchies, and free-roaming immersive theatres instrumentalize the spectator as yet another object to be moved about the stage. Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre concludes with an extended study of Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work (2013), an algorithmically deformed staging of Hamlet that points to “the desire for an actorless theatre” (201) and that reveals “the constructedness of ‘the human’ in the technicity of theatre itself” (202).

Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance offers three interrelated studies built on “a historically grounded spatial theory of technologically mediated spectatorship” (2). This theory draws on Robert Weimann’s division of medieval and early modern playing spaces into locus and platea — the former being a space of representational mimesis held at a distance from spectators, the latter a liminal space of encounter between the performers and their audience (13–14). To these zones, Aebischer adds the offstage obscene spaces to which a drama might draw a spectator’s attention, requiring yet a further degree of spectatorial involvement and engagement. Aebischer finds these zones recapitulated by 21st-century technologies used to stage early modern plays. Drawing on Hans-Thies Lehmann’s “aesthetic of responsibility (or response-ability)” (elaborated in Postdramatic Theatre [Reference Lehmann and Jürs-Munby2006]), Aebischer details the ways in which each zone places different ethical demands on an audience, and the forms of responsibility/response-ability that emerge as individual spectators navigate those demands.

Part I of Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance looks at two productions directed by Dominic Dromgoole at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse: The Changeling (2015) and The Tempest (2016). Like Worthen, Aebischer recognizes the Playhouse’s architecture as a technology peculiar to the 21st century, one that is transforming audience relations as much or more than it is excavating them from the early modern period. Mapping locus, platea, and the offstage obscene onto the space, Aebischer relates the crucial ways in which divergent meanings, interpretations, and ethical responses were available to spectators seated in different galleries. Part II considers the use of digital technologies in Joe Hill-Gibbins’s Edward II (National Theatre, 2013) and Gregory Doran’s The Tempest (RSC, 2016). In Edward II, as live-feed video cameras followed characters to inaccessible spaces, they produced experiences of the offstage obscene and the platea that implicated the audience in the violence depicted, indicting them for their failure to act (107). In The Tempest, the glitches that emerged in the live motion-capture performance of Mark Quartley as Ariel opened space, again, for a form of ethical spectatorship specifically enabled by the affordances of 21st-century technology. Part III turns to digital theatre broadcasting in an investigation that has only become more timely given the proliferation of livestreaming during the global Covid-19 pandemic. Aebischer includes compelling details from close observation of the broadcast team’s preparations, rehearsals, and performance while filming, mixing, and broadcasting the Royal Shakespeare Company Live Broadcast of Hamlet (2016). Where this case reveals biases against Black performers and other people of color encoded into the technology, the second case study reveals the impact of audiences convened online, who pushed back against the onscreen elision of the female protagonist in Cheek by Jowl’s livestream of Measure for Measure (2015). Finally, Aebischer’s conclusion moves away from stages to consider two works of visual and installation art, Davy and Kristin McGuire’s Ophelia’s Ghost and Jowonder’s 6 Days Goodbye Poems of Ophelia. These digital installations focus on the death of Ophelia to “intensify the spectator’s experience of response-ability/responsibility” once more (217).

Both books draw on shared theoretical sources, including Lehmann, Levinas, and Jacques Rancière, and both books take an expansive view of what constitutes a theatrical technology in order to reframe theatre and theatrical spectatorship in the 21st century. The two books mine adjacent concerns and suggest a potentially productive alignment. Worthen is most interested in what happens on the stage and offers a bold and provocative invitation to rethink the practice, medium, and form of theatre itself as technicity. Aebischer is less concerned with the ontological status of the technologies of performance than with the experience of the spectator who encounters them and with mapping transforming modes of spectatorship in the 21st century. Worthen’s theoretically dense argument invites extended contemplation; Aebischer’s clear observations offer new modes of action. For each author, Shakespeare and his contemporaries are an essential site and starting point, but perhaps immaterial to their conclusions and their applications. Through the ongoing and expanding remediation of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage in the 21st century, we are able to catch a glimpse of theatre as technology in our time, the worldview it emerges from and promotes, and its charge to us to act in response.