Remediations of the Theatre-in-Lockdown Works by Richard Nelson and Forced Entertainment

Janine Hauthal

doi:10.1515/jcde-2025-2008

Article

Remediations of the Theatre-in-Lockdown Works by Richard Nelson and Forced Entertainment

Janine Hauthal
is Assistant Research Professor of Intermedial Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research focusses on multilingual and postdramatic theatre, self-reflexivity across media and genres, anglophone “fictions of Europe,” British drama since the 1990 s, contemporary British and postcolonial literatures, as well as transgeneric, intermedial, and cultural narratology. She has recently published articles on “The Poetics and Politics of We-Narration on the Contemporary British Stage” (Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2024, with Dorothee Birke) and “Twenty-First-Century Retreats from Realism: Genre Crossings Between Poetry and Drama in born bad, The Lamplighter, and Is God Is” (Women Experimenting in Theatre: Early Modern to Contemporary, 2024, with Elisabeth Bekers and Jade Thomas) as well as the co-edited volume European Peripheries in the Postcolonial Literary Imagination (2024, with Anna-Leena Toivanen). Her most recent FWO-funded research project is entitled “Self-Reflexivity and Generic Change in Twenty-First-Century Black British Women’s Literature” (2021–2024).

Published/Copyright: April 29, 2025

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From the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English Volume 13 Issue 1

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many theatres and performance groups went digital to evade and confront the lockdown enforced on them and their publics. This article focusses on three anglophone stage works to analyse and compare how they experiment with the digital communication technology Zoom. Richard Nelson’s The Apple Family: A Pandemic Trilogy (2020) as well as Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting for All (2020) and How the Time Goes (2021) are first explored as instances of what Heidi Lucja Liedke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger call “viral theatre” insofar as they thematize how everyday reality changed during the pandemic and also highlight the resilience of their characters or performance personas. Adopting an intermedial approach, the analysis then focusses on how these lockdown works remediate the analogue media combination of the live theatre performance in and through the digital Zoom meeting format. As will be shown, the three works feature radically different aesthetic programmes (realist vs post- and metatheatrical) that affect how each work connects with its potential audience and which role it ascribes to the latter.

Keywords: viral theatre; Zoom; COVID-19; remediation; metatheatre; Richard Nelson; The Apple Family: A Pandemic Trilogy ; Forced Entertainment; End Meeting for All ; How the Time Goes

About the author

Janine Hauthal

is Assistant Research Professor of Intermedial Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research focusses on multilingual and postdramatic theatre, self-reflexivity across media and genres, anglophone “fictions of Europe,” British drama since the 1990 s, contemporary British and postcolonial literatures, as well as transgeneric, intermedial, and cultural narratology. She has recently published articles on “The Poetics and Politics of We-Narration on the Contemporary British Stage” (Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2024, with Dorothee Birke) and “Twenty-First-Century Retreats from Realism: Genre Crossings Between Poetry and Drama in born bad, The Lamplighter, and Is God Is” (Women Experimenting in Theatre: Early Modern to Contemporary, 2024, with Elisabeth Bekers and Jade Thomas) as well as the co-edited volume European Peripheries in the Postcolonial Literary Imagination (2024, with Anna-Leena Toivanen). Her most recent FWO-funded research project is entitled “Self-Reflexivity and Generic Change in Twenty-First-Century Black British Women’s Literature” (2021–2024).

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Published Online: 2025-04-29

Published in Print: 2025-04-24

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2025-2008

Keywords for this article

viral theatre; Zoom; COVID-19; remediation; metatheatre; Richard Nelson; The Apple Family: A Pandemic Trilogy; Forced Entertainment; End Meeting for All; How the Time Goes