Othello has long been a play that has provoked audience interjections. This chapter gives an account of a production staged by The Pantaloons theatre company in 2019 that was put together in order to explore the effects of direct audience address, playfulness and spontaneity. Player/playgoer relationships can be anticipated in the text, but they cannot be pre-programmed: they are determined by the moment-by-moment unfolding of the drama as it is played between actors and audience under specific, never-to-be-repeated conditions. Practice-as-research of this kind allows for a close-up examination of particular instances of actor/audience contact, and emphasises the creative role of the actor (and indeed the audience) in bringing ‘the play’ into its always-transient existence. Making detailed reference to the production’s rehearsal process, its development over the tour, the perspectives of its cast, and the responses of its audiences, this chapter argues that seeking opportunities for direct audience contact in Othello allows for a range of affective and ethical relationships between player and audience, some of which can have a substantial impact on the ways in which the play makes its meanings. It concludes with some thoughts about the possibilities inherent in conceptualising performance as play rather than as ‘acting’.

In medieval England, games and plays were cognate activities. The Latin term ludus was used to refer to both, and there was a substantial overlap between dramatic representations and other forms of ludic activity such as Misrule, May-games and mumming, in which participants also dressed up and adopted semi-fictional personas. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the English word “game” could be used to refer to performed drama, and even in the sixteenth century “game-player” was used as a term for what would now be called an actor. By Shakespeare's time, “games” seem to have become a category distinct from drama, but the persistence of the term “player” suggests that theatrical performance was still considered a form of ludic activity. Modern critics have often found it useful to think of early modern drama as gamelike in nature, and it is striking that the theatre practitioners involved in performance at the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe have also returned to the metaphor with some frequency. This essay will first historicize the term “game,” thinking about the meanings of the word available to the early modern player and the ways in which those meanings are both similar to and different from those available to modern actors and directors. It will then examine gamelike practice at the modern Globe, considering the extent to which the contemporary experiment allows us any kind of insight into the early modern dramaturgy of the “game.”

This year provided the opportunity to see major productions of nearly all of Shakespeare’s history plays, most of them in London. My reviewing year started with Joe Hill-Gibbins’s cleverly truncated Richard II at the Almeida Theatre. The set, by Ultz, was a bare grey vault. As the play started, Simon Russell Beale’s Richard, clad in a plain black T-shirt, came downstage, explaining to the audience that ‘I have been studying how I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world” (5.5.1–2). The rest of the cast of eight stood behind him, facing the rear wall.

Being there: Presence, absence, liveness

We zoom in on an extreme close-up of a high-definition camera lens, which morphs into a computer-generated image of a circular auditorium, before the screen resolves into the logo of the media company Digital Theatre. Digital Theatre sells online and downloadable video recordings of live theatre performances (including, of course, several high-profile Shakespearean productions). Its trailers all begin with the same animated logo, which is designed, presumably, to convey the fluidity with which its productions traverse the digital and the theatrical domains. Its trailers all end in the same way, too, with the paradoxical catchphrase: ‘Digital Theatre. Be there.’ One would assume, of course, that the main reason for purchasing one of Digital Theatre’s products is that one could not ‘be there’; customers might have missed the original production, for example, or simply desire a lasting record of a cherished theatrical experience which has now passed into memory. The catchphrase tantalises its online audience with the impossible: you are not ‘there’, it seems to be saying, but this product can make you feel as though you were.

This simultaneous privileging and troubling of physical presence as a signifier of theatrical authenticity is something that underlies much of the performance work considered in this chapter. Writing in 1999, Philip Auslander famously challenged the ‘reductive binary opposition of the live and the mediatized’ (2008: 3) which he had identified in the work of critics such as Peggy Phelan. For Phelan, the distinction was precise:

The climax to Afghan company Roy-e-Sabs’ The Comedy of Errors gained much of its power through its physical manifestation of reunion. When Parwin Mushtahel's Zan-e Motakef (Emilia) recognized Shah Mamnoon Maqsudi's Ehsan (Egeon) as her husband, their subsequent embrace drew a spontaneous and highly emotional round of applause from the audience at Shakespeare's Globe. It was the first in a series of reunions between estranged family members – brothers, lovers, parents and children – each of which moved the audience to further applause and cheering. Here, the final hand-hold between the two Dromios (here named Bostan) was just one more in a sequence of physical embraces which had involved hugs, clasps, kisses and the cupping of faces. Roy-e-Sabs’ Paris-based director, Corinne Jaber, has argued that such reunions carry a particular emotional charge for Afghan audiences, many of whom will themselves have travelled to search for lost relatives after long periods of enforced separation.

The Globe audience presumably included a significant number of Afghan expatriates, since many were clearly following the Dari Persian language. This was an audience willing to express its emotional responses loudly and emphatically: from ironic wolf-whistles at Shah Mamnoon Maqsudi's drag-act Kukeb (Nell), to laughs of delight at the production's inventiveness and gasps at its plot twists. Some of the more excitable reactions came in response to the production's willingness to break Afghan cultural norms: while touching between genders is highly taboo in Afghanistan, the women in The Comedy of Errors touched the male performers frequently, and often in overtly sexual ways. Sodaba/Adriana rubbed her leg against that of Arsalan of Samarqand/Antipholus of Syracuse; Rodaba/Luciana wrestled on the floor with Arsalan of Kabul/Antipholus of Ephesus; all three women embraced their husbands in the final scene.