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

Taking a fresh approach to the study of live theatre broadcasting, this book focuses on National Theatre Live a decade after its launch in 2009. It embeds livecasting in its historical context of 19th-century electrophone technology, assesses its position in contemporary discourse on the meaning of theatre for spectators, in a pre- and post-pandemic moment, and points towards its future.

Heidi Liedke navigates between an interdisciplinary range of 20th- and 21st-century theorists from the fields of cultural studies, theatre studies and performance philosophy. Combining lively analyses of recent theatre performances with auto-ethnographic accounts, she turns to 20th-century thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht in order to understand livecasting’s position in a continuum of developments taking place on the borders of media, film and performance for the past 100 years.

Locating livecasting on the conceptual tripod of spectacle, materiality and engagement, Livecasting in Twenty-First Century British Theatre asks what role audiences and their engagement play in livecasting. These conceptual threads are illustrated by in-depth analyses of recent NT Live shows, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2019), Antony and Cleopatra (2018) and Small Island (2019) and 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.