Live theatre creates a relationship with audiences that sees the few speaking to the many in a space where the many can respond as one, so can a live digital performance ever substitute for that? Only if we seize this moment to include audiences in the creative process, says Robert Reid.
Now, stop me if you’ve heard this one.
Q: Why did the professional late night TV talk show hosts struggle so badly with the transition to broadcasting from home during the lockdown? A: Because there’s no substitute for a live audience.
In the first weeks of the global COVID-19 lockdown, I was fascinated to watch as such seasoned performers as Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Myers clumsily rebooted their shows in a format that YouTubers have been successfully working for over a decade. The late night hosts seemed at first shell shocked and lost in their final broadcasts from their empty studios, broadcasting what seemed more like backstage footage from rehearsals than the slick productions of only a night before.
They followed this with several weeks of faltering attempts to carry on the talk show format, intended for performance in front of a live studio audience and honed over decades of broadcast. The awkward, laugh-free pauses between jokes in opening monologues while they instinctively wait for an audience reaction that’s never going to come, the grindingly stilted inclusion of their families into sketches and the woeful production values (can somebody please send Jimmy Fallon a DSLR and a ring light) all point to a fundamental difference between making performance work designed for the internet and using the internet to just broadcast performance work designed for a present audience. That difference being the conceptualisation of the audience itself... Keep reading on Witness