Livecasting in Twenty-First-Century British Theatre: NT Live and the Aesthetics of Spectacle, Materiality and Engagement

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This significant contribution to the study of the live and recorded broadcasting of stage plays focuses on National Theatre Live a decade after its launch in 2009. Assessing livecasting through the concepts of spectacle, materiality and engagement, it examines the role played by audiences in livecasting. Illustrated by in-depth analyses of recent NT Live shows, including A Midsummer Nights Dream (2019), Antony and Cleopatra (2018) and Small Island (2019), the book is complemented by insights from practitioners involved in the making of the livecasts. Finally, livecasting is contextualized within recently emerged forms of Covidian (virtual) theatre during the pandemic in order to offer some thoughts on the future of the genre of theatrical performance. Combining lively analyses of recent theatre performances with auto-ethnographic accounts, Heidi Lucja Liedke turns to 20th-century thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht in order to understand livecastings place in a continuum of developments taking place on the borders of media, film and performance for the past 100 years. As well as embedding livecasting in its historical context of 19th-century electrophone technology, Liedke assesses its position in contemporary discourses on the meaning of theatre for spectators in the pre- and post-pandemic moment, and points towards the forms future.

Reviews

Livecasting in Twenty-First-Century British Theatre is a rich, rigorous and provocative study of both this new creative hybrid of cinema, television and theatre and of the radical cultural changes imposed by lockdown. An essential read for those studying this form and for those who make it. * John Wyver, Professor of the Arts on Screen, University of Westminster, UK *

Author Bio

Heidi Lucja Liedke is Interim Professor in English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. From 2018-2020 she was a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. She is the co-editor of a special issue of Theatre Research International on Presence, Politics, Resistance: Tendencies in (Post-)Pandemic Performance and Theatre (March 2023). Her work has been published in Performance Matters (2019), Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (2021) and Participations (2021). Twitter: @heidilulie