Erin Sullivan, University of Birmingham
The Covid-19 pandemic radically reshaped theatre broadcasting in the UK and beyond. While lockdowns accelerated digital innovation at many theatres, the challenge of reopening physical venues in an even more financially constrained arts landscape led to the shrinking of broadcasting projects at many organizations. As Fiona Morris and Sarah Butcher wrote in 2024 for Arts Professional, ‘For many [arts organizations], digital capture of live performance has become more of a luxury than a strategic choice.’
This paper considers how the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, one of the major players in live theatre broadcasting in the 2010s, has navigated these challenges in the aftermath of Covid (and also in relation to its change in artistic directorship in 2023). In doing so, the paper looks at three screen projects that chart the RSC’s transition from multicamera cinema broadcasts in the 2010s to more pared-down, in-house recordings in the 2020s: All’s Well That Ends Well (dir. Blanche McIntyre for the stage, 2022, and McIntyre, Todd MacDonald, Hayley Pepler, and John Wyver for the screen, 2023), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Eleanor Rhode for the stage, 2024, and Mark Kendrick for the screen, 2025), and Macbeth (dir. Wils Wilson for the stage, 2023, and Mark Kendrick for the screen, 2024).
While all three of these productions were live filmed, none of them were live broadcast, and all worked to smaller budgets than had been the case pre-Covid. The directors of All’s Well opted for a more overtly filmic aesthetic than had previously been seen in the RSC’s ‘Live from Stratford-upon-Avon’ broadcast series, while those involved in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth followed a more ‘capture’-oriented, archival brief.Through a consideration of these projects, I argue that live-filmed Shakespearean performance remains viable post-Covid, albeit in much-changed form. As prestige live broadcasts to cinemas increasingly become a thing of the past, screen directors and producers are faced with two main options: experiment with the affordances of non-live, post-produced film, or embrace the possibilities of in-the-moment, archive-oriented recording.
Biography: Erin Sullivan is a Reader in Shakespeare at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. She is the author of Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice (Palgrave, 2022), which explores the impact of digital technologies on the performance and adaptation of Shakespeare. Her work has appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin (2017), Shakespeare (2018), Participations (2020), Shakespeare Survey (2023), and Contemporary Theatre Review (2025), as well as Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation (Bloomsbury, 2022), which she also co-edited.