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SAMUEL BECKETT’S PLAY IN DIGITAL CULTURE: TECHNOLOGIES OF INFLUENCE
question of where the audience would be, and under what exact conditions
they would perceive the content. We agreed from the outset that there would
be anintention to harness the live-streaming capabilities of the technical setup
by broadcasting to a remote site." We investigated several software options
for streaming video content, and Telestream’s “Wirecast Play for YouTube”
proved to be the most robust, affordable and compatible with the camera
hardware. Wirecast Play is a piece of software that is especially designed to be
compatible with the YouTube’s live-streaming service. In spite of the ethical
challenges inherent in engaging with one of the “big five” data firms, YouTube
does provide a service that allows amateurs, non-professionals, and small
enterprises to broadcast cultural content without having to pay substantial
broadcast license overheads, which is an improvement on the top-down
broadcasting model that dominated the twentieth century.
In a live production where the audience is anchored to a single perspective,
part of the fascination of Play is the observation of a live actor “running the
race” under “real” conditions, where the observer can feel the actors’ risk in
having to respond accurately to hundreds of prompts over a period of ten
minutes, and then repeat the performance. Screened versions of the play do
not occasion the same sensation, since visible editing — used abstractly to
some extent in Marin Karmitz’s 1966 Comédie, but much more visibly and
extensively in Minghella’s more recent version — implies that the actor is
not achieving their performance in one take, but rather that a director is
assembling the material asynchronously. The ontology of film thus disrupts
the dramaturgy — unsurprisingly, given the play’s strong link to the theatre —
not only because of this added layer of authority above even the interrogator,
but also because it deprives the actors of their purgatorial logic by implying
rest. We were excited by the possibility that a PTZ live-stream could engage
the impact of the screen without this dramaturgical trade-off, showing the
audience a single, continuous take, ostensibly performed by live actors in a
nearby room for their benefit.
This gesture implies an ethical progression for the audience, from the
theatrical/filmic situation of “witnessing” interrogation to actually becoming
the interrogator. The editing choices reflected this journey by the viewer, and
we took the offer made by Beckett to allow for an element of variation in the
da capo by showing this progression, in the following schema:
Block A (before chorus, first time): wide shot locked off, manual interrogator light
Block B (after chorus, first time): pan and zoom, “signal” lights to show camera focus
The remote venue for the audience was the Arts Technology Research Laboratory, about
a ten-minute walk from the Samuel Beckett Centre dance studio where the PTZ camera,
actors, and technicians were set up. The latency in the digital network between the two
spaces was about ten seconds.