Among the swell of academic works seeking to account for the intermedial effects that digital technologies have had on theatre, W. B. Worthen's Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre instead posits that theatre itself is an already intermedial technology. Through performance, theatre constantly engages in the absorption and remediation of its technologies, and in so doing theatre also renegotiates its own technological relation to its human subjects. Worthen attends to theatre's technicity by engaging with various technologies remediated by theatre and interrogating “how the practices of theatre evoke, substantiate, [and] reciprocally mark the theatre as a technological apparatus” (34). Reflecting Shakespeare's hegemonic cultural influence on theatre practice and ideologies, Worthen's analysis considers contemporary Shakespeare performance in its capacity as theatre. Much of the theoretical work developed by Worthen should prove useful to Shakespeare performance studies, but this specific appeal notwithstanding, perhaps Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre's most incisive intervention will be in critical studies interested in modern theatre's absorption of digital technology, unpicking as it does the presumptive ontological claims and cultural significations that pervade discourses of technologized theatre.
The Introduction lays out the formal and theoretical basis for reading theatre through its technicity, demonstrated most vividly by Worthen through an exploration of Samuel Beckett's textual/technical practices—an effective if perhaps surprising choice for opening material in a book where Shakespeare is given lead billing. Worthen's theoretical considerations are particularly indebted to Bernard Stiegler in viewing theatre as a “prosthetic” that mediates our coinstantiating relationship to and interactions with technology (28–31). Stiegler's influence is apparent throughout the monograph's case studies, which read the theatrical use of technology as part of the hailing of spectators as technologized subjects.
The monograph's second chapter centers on the use of live-feed video in Shakespeare productions by Thomas Ostermeier, the Wooster Group, and Ivo van Hove, narrowing in especially forcefully on the visual amplification of Lars Eidinger's face via digital projection in Ostermeier's Hamlet. Worthen examines this performative effect as a type of hypermediatization, a dramaturgical doubling down on theatre's longstanding renegotiation of the face-to-face encounter through technologies of acting.
Chapter 3 focuses on the digital textuality of apps created for engagement with the Shakespearean playtext. The chapter's most compelling section situates text-based actor rehearsal and training apps in relation to early modern cue scripts. Worthen argues that, far from their promised capacity to enable new actorly insights into Shakespeare's plays by presenting them in a digitized form, apps designed to help actors find work and get off-book engender a vision of a text-based theatre that imbricates in their design the “values [of] a specific scene of professional competence” (95). As the author also acknowledges, this claim is perhaps unsurprising. Like Edward Alleyn's cue script scrolls, apps for actorly preparation serve a specific function in the industrialization of theatre's labor processes. That said, Worthen's conclusion is important and insightful. It serves as a reminder that most of the technologies used in the theatrical production of meaning also occupy a position within theatre's industrial apparatus.
The book's wide-ranging fourth chapter attends, most significantly, to the fraught remediating claims underpinning the Original Practice (OP) performance systems that are purported to function as “mnemotechnologies” (5–7) by engendering the invocation of early modern theatrical meanings. Although optimism for the reanimation of transhistorical meaning through OP performances has somewhat waned in recent years, Worthen's understanding of theatre as an intermediating technology (in this case, theatre “remediating” theatre) usefully serves to recognize that “the epistemological claims of OP are a function of its technicity” and that its “discoveries” are, in this way, enmeshed within contemporary material practices and subjectivities (105, 141).
Discourses of interactivity and immersion are carried forward into Chapter 5, which principally uses Punchdrunk's Sleep No More to consider how the technology of immersive theatre instantiates or “designs its audience[s]” (158). For Worthen, the dramaturgical technologies of Sleep No More results in audiences experiencing a “prostheticized freedom” (147). This chapter meticulously unpacks the show's use of immersive theatre technologies in both theoretical and descriptive detail by offering an especially compelling close reading of Punchdrunk's production of audience subjectivity through carefully managed rules around the wearing of anonymizing white masks.
Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre concludes with a chapter on Annie Dorsen's A Piece of Work (2013), the director's self-described “machine-made” Hamlet in which Shakespeare's text is processed by an algorithm and its output relayed to the actor for recitation on the stage (197). Worthen's close reading of performance interrogates the explicitly technologized aspects of A Piece of Work, in which the text which is shown “visibly to drive the instruments of performance” (179), in order to explain the technicity of theatre writ large. That is, Worthen posits that the text-as-algorithm model of A Piece of Work dramatizes a performance ideology that views acting as the “material execution” of an encoded script even as acting also applies its own logic (derived from actor training and preparation) to arrive at its output, or “performance” (178–9).
Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre dives in and out of dialogue with a concatenation of works by Shakespeare scholars, performance studies theorists, phenomenologists, philosophers of technology, cultural theorists, performance-as-research scholar-practitioners, and a myriad of others. Worthen's opening chapter offers a theoretical foothold for readers who find themselves compelled (given the book's structure) to delve into individuated chapters. However, although some chapters feel relatively self-contained in their considerations, the monograph's theoretical complexity often means that the author's positioning only arrives at its complete articulation when more theoretical and subject material is brought into view over the course of several chapters. In truth, and unfortunately, this theoretical complexity probably limits the book's reach. But what is most impressive about Worthen's work is that it wrangles together an impressive array of influences to produce a methodologically inventive monograph with a persuasive ontological argument about theatre: that it “does not merely use technology, appropriating instruments and devices from a surrounding technical sphere, but enacts a constant medial renovation, dramatizing the ongoing representation of the prosthetics of the theatrical human” (103). This is a vital and necessary claim that cuts through the mythologizing discourses around theatre technology, and one that takes some of the dazzling sheen off the tendency to overstate the transformational impact of digitally augmented dramaturgy.
