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NICHOLAS E. JOHNSON, NEILL O’DWYER, AND ENDA BATES
digital culture. It is the first in-depth exploration of process and product of
Experiment One (14 April 2017), also known as Intermedial Play, a version
of Play that emerged from conversations relating to creative possibilities for
a PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) robotic teleconferencing camera and control unit.
Conceptually exploring the similarity between such a camera (designed for
surveillance applications) and the “interrogator” light of Beckett’s script, this
experiment was staged with live actors performing in one room but streamed
via a web link to an audience sitting in a different building, raising questions
of simultaneity and “live risk” that are generally absent from digital and film
adaptations of Play. The second experiment, relating to a user-centered FVV
(Free-Viewpoint-Video, a variety of VR or Virtual Reality) version called
Virtual Play, raises other questions about the new cultural subjectivities
imposed on humans by new technologies of presence.’
Authored by the three collaborators who developed the Intermedial
Play/Virtual Play project at a conceptual level — working as director
(Nicholas Johnson), videographer/scenographer (Néill O’Dwyer), and sound
artist (Enda Bates) — this essay will discuss the strands of influence in
each of our areas of responsibility in the project, with special attention to
the dynamic tension between “tradition” and “innovation” in Beckettian
performance. In addition to outside influences that were brought into the
rehearsal room, this project drew from our research into prior production
histories as well as film adaptations (both Marin Karmitz’s 1966 Comédie
and Anthony Minghella’s 2001 Beckett on Film adaptation). Placing these past
versions of Play in dialogue with our 2017 experiments will help elicit the
specificities of new, real-time, digital telepresence technologies, which we feel
offer a fresh digital augmentation of a pivotal script within Beckett’s oeuvre,
as well as a Beckettian response to the technologies themselves.
DIRECTORIAL INFLUENCES
A central ontological challenge of the live theatre is that while the “blueprint”
of a source text might remain mostly the same over time, the conditions
of its production and reception continuously change. This shift could be
considered as a problem of influence, occurring on multiple levels. First, the
circumstances that apply to a given context — social, technological, material
— affect what types of production are conceivable, permissible, or otherwise
possible at a given time and place for the artists involved. Second, these
2 As detailed analyses ofthe Virtual Play project have been published elsewhere, this publication
will not engage substantially with it; see Néill O’ Dwyer — Nicholas Johnson: Exploring
Volumetric Video and Narrative through Samuel Beckett’s Play, International Journal of
Performance Arts and Digital Media, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2019). DOI: 14794713.2019.1567243.
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