1. “There and Back Again”: The History of Theatre Closings as History of Dramatic Innovation

The closing of the theatres during the 2020/2021 lockdowns is often characterised as “unprecedented” by contemporary audiences and theatre scholars (Fuchs, Theater 1; Clarke and Smurthwaite). Yet a look back in time shows that the history of theatre has always been, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it, a history of “there and back again”: there have been repeated theatre lockdowns and reopenings for a variety of reasons, some of them medical, some of them political, sometimes both. In the early modern period, severe outbreaks of the plague, such as the one of 1593 and 1594 or the one of 1665, caused the authorities to close the London playhouses. During the Interregnum (1649–1660), all theatrical performances were banned by Parliament for political reasons. And even if the 1737 Stage Licensing Act did not close theatrical institutions as such, it imposed strict limitations on production. Still, some of the most innovative plays were penned in these times, such as William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (c 1603) (Literary Hub). Significant generic renewals took place, such as Margaret Cavendish’s rediscovery and revitalisation of the closet play after 1642. Her practice of writing plays that were to be performed not in conventional stagings but by communal readings in private drawing rooms or closets arguably led to “a revolution in dramatic production” (Straznicky 77; see also Craig).^[1] Restrictions on theatre have also engendered narrative-dramatic cross-fertilisations and instigated powerful transgeneric reformations of the literary system per se, for instance, when the Stage Licensing Act forced dramatist Henry Fielding to stop playwriting (O’Shaugnessy) and use his experience in dramatic satire instead to participate in bringing a whole new literary genre into the world: the novel (Schwanecke, Narratology 166–167).

This short diachronic sketch shows that the 2020/2021 COVID-19 lockdowns are by no means a singularity in theatre history, although modern audiences often seem to have experienced them as such. Like earlier examples of governmental artistic regulation, they are part of a lively and diverse theatre history, one that is riddled with fissures and inconsistencies (see also Tichenor) which, paradoxically, spur theatrical innovation in highly productive, multi-modal, and fascinating ways. As the 2024 CDE conference as well as the present volume vividly demonstrate, nowadays this innovation – and this is the actual novelty – chiefly takes place in digital realms. With Bill Blake, one can put this in a nutshell:

All the [. . .] different attitudes and convictions about the relation between theatre and digital make for a heady mix of alarmism and wilfulness, inevitability and hope. To imagine that the theatre might be on the verge of giving itself up to the digital amounts to either the worst possible threat or a much-desired revolutionary promise. It is really something new for the theatre to be talked about in these ways. (2–3; emphasis added)

The present article poses the question of how the COVID-19 lockdowns might have spurred digital innovation and novelty in playwriting, performance, and dramatic reception. As articles like the one by Leslie Wade show, anglophone theatres have used digital media for theatrical and performative innovation since 2009 at the latest. Sarah Bay-Cheng paints an even broader picture, arguing that “theatre and theatricality [. . .] [have been part of] an ongoing media convergence that began more than 100 years prior to the pandemic but has accelerated within it” (194). With this in mind, I ask what the governing characteristics of drama and performance in virtual domains were during the COVID-19 pandemic. By way of example, I focus on the Irish theatre company Fishamble, which managed, during the lockdown, to produce highly multifaceted and inventive theatre in the digital space. When public life had come to a halt in 2020, when people spent their entire days in isolation, and when the theatrical life we were used to was, once more, quasi nonexistent, Fishamble devoted themselves to keeping people’s “creativity flowing” (“Tiny Play Challenge”) in imaginative, playful, and sustainable ways. With a series of national and international online playwriting competitions, the #TinyPlayChallenge, and remote performances, Tiny Plays 24/7, Fishamble relocated theatrical production and reception to digital realms. They consequently not only helped to keep theatre alive, but also enabled generic experiment, multi-modal renewal, as well as dramatic and digital innovation – an innovation that has arguably come to stay.

This article enquires into the medial, formal, and social advantages of digital theatre that Fishamble exploit during the most recent times of enforced individual and institutional restraints. To start with, I locate the company’s efforts in the context of contemporary digital theatre. In the three subsequent sections, I explore different hypotheses: first, the Irish theatre-makers ask the then pressing question of how to acquire liberty in absolute restriction and by means of absolute restriction. Second, the online theatre competition #TinyPlayChallenge plays and experiments with forms of community in isolation. Third, the plays chosen for online publication on Fishamble’s homepage and for remote online performance, as in Tiny Plays 24/7, renegotiate the notoriously complicated questions of what theatre and performance are.

2. #TinyPlayChallenge and Tiny Plays 24/7 as Highly Versatile Forms of Theatre in the Digital Age

Fishamble see themselves as a theatre company that is declaredly “dedicated to discovering, developing, and producing new plays” (Culleton qtd. in Culleton and Radley 200). When the theatres closed, they made use of digital media’s technical, formal, and social qualities to remain faithful to their aims. As Jim Culleton, artistic director of Fishamble, explains: “All our training and development workshops went online, we created new productions online, and filmed existing work in the repertoire which we shared digitally as well” (qtd. in Culleton and Radley 207–208). While the World Wide Web, for Fishamble, virtually substituted spaces of artistic training and dramaturgical development, it also replaced the stage as performance venue and, increasingly, became a valuable source of creativity and innovation.

With the online competition #TinyPlayChallenge, Fishamble used the early lockdown as a source of inspiration and made a virtue of necessity: they invited people to write and submit plays about their COVID-19 experiences. Building on the politically enforced spatial restrictions and transferring them into dramatic form, they asked for really “tiny” plays, plays of no more than 600 words. They also made a point of circumscribing the content: they set weekly changing keywords, for instance, “community,” “essential,” or “change,” which were to be used as thematic prompts. They explored spaces of artistic freedom within tight formal boundaries, using the opportunities which virtual life has to offer (for example, you can communicate from a distance without physically meeting; you can experiment with form and test different media formats in theatrical production). Fishamble accordingly established digital media as a primary channel of communicating their programme, as dramaturgical platform for the commissioning and producing of plays, and as performance space. For recipients, digital media offered a platform to consume drama, to critically engage with both theatre and the present situation, and a site of interpersonal communication.

As Dorothee Birke and Anja Hartl have pointed out in their introduction to this volume, plays and digital media may intertwine chiefly on four different levels: (1) on the content level, where plays reflect “on the social impact of digitalisation processes”; (2) in performance, where directors decide to use “digital technologies in stage production”; (3) in performance, when plays are staged that “centrally feature a particular aspect of the digital in staging”; and (4) in productions that use “digital technologies as a primary channel for their dissemination.” Remarkably, as the following sections show, Fishamble’s #TinyPlayChallenge and Tiny Plays 24/7 are so versatile and flexible that they, to different degrees, stretch across all four of these dimensions: they make use of different kinds of the digital in a myriad of ways and for a variety of purposes, as can be seen in the productions of the tiny plays “Wild Horses” or “Change.” The script of Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s “Wild Horses,” for instance, thematises the gains and losses of Zoom meetings (level 1) and calls for a production that makes use of the aesthetics of a video call (level 3). Furthermore, its Tiny Plays 24/7 staging used online streaming as way of transmission (level 4). In contrast to “Wild Horses,” “Change” does not explicitly thematise digital media. Rather, it can be described as a posthuman play that features allegorical characters, like the sea and the land. Yet Fishamble’s dramaturgic choice was to base the play solely on (digital) film material: a digitally and remotely controlled drone flying across both sea and land was used to show dramatic, deserted landscapes (level 2). Its performance was transmitted online, too (level 4). With this, “Change” is part of a body of digital theatre that, according to Matthew Causey, is characterised by “posthuman and postorganic performance” (47) and that causes the theatre to “(dis)appear” in virtual spaces (67).

3. Artistic and Psychological Freedom in Times of Physical Restriction

Inspired by the lockdowns of 2020, one of the purposes of the Irish theatre-makers’ venture into digital realms was to ask the then pressing question of how to acquire liberty in absolute restriction by means of absolute restriction – and this on at least three levels: subject matter, technical aspects, and form. On the level of subject matter, most of the plays entering the competition tackle virulent problems of the lockdowns. Plays such as Grace Lobo’s “Bear Hunt” or Caitríona Daly’s “Martyrs” thematise physical restriction or isolation, the ensuing interpersonal, social frictions, as well as emotions of frustration and despair. “Martyrs,” for example, was submitted in the week when the prompt was “essential,” and the piece discusses discrepancies in what people deem essential in general and in the special circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. The play is an argument between a son, Alan, and his seventy-two-year-old mother, Margaret. She is doubly prone to a life-threatening infection, not just because she is elderly, but also because she is an alcoholic. Margaret has just returned from the supermarket, to which she should not have gone in the first place. Two days ago, Alan had bought this week’s groceries, including three bottles of wine. And yet she went out herself, buying nine more. The play addresses predominant practices and experiences during the lockdown: sitting at home, making lists of what to buy the one time a week one is allowed into the supermarket; rationalising one’s resources as well as the anxiety that they are not going to last; the sorrow about vulnerable groups, the elderly and the ill – as well as their resulting isolation.

The play not only deliberates what people deem essential (to the mother, it is having enough wine; to the son, it is his mother’s safety and social distancing), but also the advantages and disadvantages of the governmental safety measures (the protection of vulnerable groups by avoidance of contact with other people versus the resultant loneliness, depression, and recourse to alcohol). Weighing up these options, Alan sacrifices himself and his prohibitionist beliefs. Not wanting his mother to catch the virus outside, which might be fatal to her because of her age and her precondition, he eventually offers to buy her the large quantities of wine she needs. While the mother seems to fear the barring of access to her life’s necessity more than the virus, the son deems it essential to keep his mother from leaving the house again: to him, probably in the face of the excess mortality among older people, the alcohol seems to be the lesser evil.

In facilitating the creation of plays like this one, Fishamble show how immensely valuable formal restrictions in playwriting can be. These are employed to spur creativity, to create spaces of artistic freedom. In analogy to flourishing narrative genres like flash fiction or six-word stories (see, for example, Basseler; Fishelov; Schwanecke, “Revalorising”), which rely on brevity, word counts, and other quantitative restrictions, Fishamble ask playwrights to restrict themselves to a given topic and confine themselves to 600 words. Within those 600 words, huge topics like loneliness, physical constraints, or consumerist restrictions are explored. In consequence, they exploit vital advantages of theatrical form, as can be seen from the introductory dialogue of “Martyrs”:

ALAN: I’m not the one telling you what to do, Mam. It’s the government telling you what to do.

MARGARET: Ah you’re enjoying it all the same.

ALAN: Waiting on you hand and foot? Sure every day is a spa day now.

MARGARET: Lording it over me.

ALAN: So you were in the supermarket out of spite?

In condensed form, even this brief passage showcases drama’s ability to establish interpersonal fissures and human conflicts within seconds: no narratorial framing is needed; a tense atmosphere like the one between Alan and his mother can be created by a short, stichomythic verbal exchange. Secondly, it demonstrates drama’s huge formal flexibility: unlike the novel, it can almost instantly generate psychological depth in characters. We see Alan’s frustration and Margaret’s spite straight away. Moreover, unlike film and television, drama does not need elaborate sets to evoke a sense of time and space; word scenery and verbal allusions alone invite the “willing suspension of disbelief” and the evocation of spaces and times, such as the life in an old woman’s tiny flat during the lockdown. The third advantage is drama’s dual nature, which allows for a publication of playscripts (as closet plays), independently of a future stage realisation.

As far as digital culture is concerned, the sociocultural benefits of the tiny plays are obvious, as they cater to a radical shift in reading audiences’ preferences. Sketching the move towards what he terms the “attention economy,” Yves Citton explains how authors, publishers, and other cultural agents have recently started to compete for the attention of possible recipients, while, at the same time, on the part of aforementioned recipients, “cultural frustrations arise [. . .] from a lack of available time to read, listen or watch all the treasures hastily downloaded onto our hard drives or recklessly accumulated on our shelves” (4). As a result, reading preferences have shifted towards brevity.

Like flash fiction, tiny plays can be consumed in an instant. At the same time, they do not have to be. Thus, they cater to the needs of different audiences and reading types. Under the paradigm of the attention economy, surface reading is possible for those who, while reading or watching a play, multitask in digital spaces. Also, deep reading is possible for those who do not care for digital distraction while engaging with the plays and who have enough time at their disposal to stop once in a while and think about the profound concerns latent even in plays of only 600 words.

As far as digital technologies are concerned, Fishamble explore the relation between theatre and isolation by making use of the possibilities of web-based communication channels. They exploit media formats and online practices ubiquitous in digital culture, opening up spaces for the creative mind within digital culture. Encouraging themselves and other theatre practitioners to creatively look for theatrical sites beyond the well-known institutions, sites beyond the traditional, analogue realms, Fishamble devised an online playwriting competition. They used their Internet presence, that is, their webpage, to advertise the concept and to gently nudge playwrights and laypeople alike to explore the creative liberty that lies at the intersections of drama and digitalisation – not only, but also in times of restriction.

Of course, formal and medial affordances of the digital have facilitated the competition’s success during the lockdown. Fishamble advertised their competition not only on their homepage but also via social media. Employing platforms like Instagram and X/Twitter (hence the prominent “#” in the challenge’s title), they made use of their wide reach, their potential for making things go viral. Playwrights and people interested in theatre shared the information on the competition, liked it, linked it, commented on it, and finally participated in it. What is more, media practices during the lockdown and the physical restrictions themselves facilitated the success of #TinyPlayChallenge and ensured high participation rates. The time people had on their hands during the lockdown, the long periods spent on the Internet and in front of computers and phone screens increased the popularity of the competition and the actual influx of plays. This artistic challenge within the everyday struggles the lockdowns brought proved to be highly productive: the company reports that over 470 plays were submitted from Ireland and all over the world (“Tiny Play Challenge”).

4. The Digitalisation of Playwriting and Reception in Tiny Plays 24/7: Creating New (Theatre) Communities

“Isolation, restriction, and fear” – it is with these words that Ciara L. Murphy describes the “milieu,” the atmosphere, surrounding theatre, especially stand-up performance, during Ireland’s lockdown (144).^[2] She emphasises how this milieu and the absence of live performance made the importance of “collectively” shared experiences become more apparent. In a similar vein, Laura Beck describes how new performance communities had to be created during the lockdowns. Both authors show how apps, streaming services, and social media were creatively used to establish new kinds of community. #TinyPlayChallenge and Tiny Plays 24/7 are thus part of a body of digital theatre that is concerned with the topic of community in isolation. In contrast to Barbara Fuchs, who argues that in times of social distancing, digital theatre productions “replace togetherness with individualized experience” (Theater 115), I argue that Fishamble’s digital theatre tries to counteract this replacement. They resurrect the intermittently lost analogue theatrical experience, which is by Hans-Thies Lehmann’s definition not solitary at all, but, first and foremost, communal (Fuchs, Theater 115). “As a medium and genre emerging from and designed for public performances in a shared space and with a long history of civic engagement behind them, theater and drama seem to be uniquely positioned to (re-)build consensus and negotiate [. . .] common ground[s of experiences]” (Hartmann and Saal 4) – even when said “shared space” has gone online, as can be seen below.

Tiny Plays 24/7, in particular, digitalises playwriting and reception not only to “keep [. . .] communities engaged” (“Tiny Play Challenge”), but also to discuss and recreate communities with the help of new media. As Johanna Hartmann and Ilka Saal argue: “Notions of community are often anchored in a sense of sameness” (5); they can evolve around shared social experiences, be they theatrical or pandemic. That community in a variety of senses is a thematic concern of a body of plays submitted to #TinyPlayChallenge is not a coincidence. By choosing “community” as one of the weekly prompts, Fishamble invite people, over the course of one week, to pen tiny plays that tackle the theme head-on. Lora Hartin’s “Kiss of Death,” for example, set at the night of a last house party before the impending lockdown, and Eric O’Brien’s “The Wonder of You,” depicting a lockdown funeral procession, grieve the loss of pre-pandemic communities. At the same time, the plays show how new communities can be built, even in isolation, if people are only creative or brave enough.

“The Wonder of You,” which negotiates ways of grieving during the lockdown, when one could not even attend funerals, shows this particularly clearly. Two characters, “DA and SON,” as the stage directions stipulate, “[sit] in a car, at the side of a road, waiting.” They are at an unusual funeral procession of Son’s uncle, who has possibly died because of the virus, as the news on the radio, in which the rise of COVID-19-fatalities is stated, lead us to infer. The funeral congregation is physically separated; even Son’s mother sits in another car, possibly because either she or her family carry the virus. All cars are waiting for the hearse to pass; and Da feels sorry for his brother-in-law: “Not one person walking behind the hearse. Awful. It’s no way to go.” People cannot pay their last respects to the deceased by, as is usually the case, communally walking behind the hearse. Instead, they have to say their goodbyes from a distance, in the confines of their cars, separated from the world through metal and glass; and worse, they get caught in a huge traffic jam. A metonymical situation for the lockdown in general, in which “nothing is moving either way,” Son is joking: “Don’t know which is worse uncle Derek dying or being stuck in a car with you.”

As is indicated in the tone of Da and Son’s banter, the play will end on a hopeful note, in spite of its sad tone. Inspired by Da, who climbs on top of his car, people wind down their car windows and spontaneously join the father in singing the uncle’s favourite song, Elvis Presley’s “The Wonder of You.” Singing this song together, they unexpectedly share the experience of a collective goodbye in spite of the circumstances. By forming a choir, a group of people who sing together, and by way of the lyrics, they rebuild a sense of community. Collectively singing despite being physically apart, they perform what the song says. They give each other “hope and consolation” as well as the “strength to carry on” – a sense of which the audience can grasp, as the play ends with the comforting melody of the well-known song and with Da singing the very words by Elvis, while the others are joining him.

In addition to the content of the plays (whose production can arguably be seen as a communal effort), Fishamble also build extra-textual communities by means of the medial and social possibilities the digital offers. A look at their homepage attests to this: the logo used for #TinyPlayChallenge, for instance, intermedially invokes the idea of “community in isolation” (see figure 1). In its combination of text and image, the logo tries to symbolically evoke the sense that artists’ thoughts went beyond the confines of their houses, meeting in the challenge. The online presence of Fishamble as a theatre company, a medial benefit of the digital, thus enables them to advertise the potential social affordances of the online presence. The text/picture combination implies this: although the theatres are closed and playwrights sit at home, in isolation, #TinyPlayChallenge enables them to still join in a communal venture and produce new plays.

Figure 1

Intermedial evocation of the idea of “community in isolation” – the logo of #TinyPlayChallenge. Photo: “Tiny Play Challenge.”

The logo features different houses of different colours and sizes; they are distinctly separated. And yet all houses have one thing in common: there are people inside; because above all the houses, there are thinking clouds. The lightbulbs symbolise the ideas of the people inside; and the fact that they are seen, while people are not, implies that even though bodies are restrained by physical boundaries, creativity and ideas are not. The online competition seems to allow the latter to move beyond the walls, beyond the physical restrictions of analogue life. People and thoughts are supposed to be linked to and inspired by what appears in big letters across the picture: “Tiny Play Challenge.” Thus, the intermedial combination of text and image prominently suggests that the people in the houses are linked by Fishamble’s challenge as well as by people’s communal effort to creatively contribute to it, even in isolation.

The attempt to establish new communities is also reinforced by the exploitation of further medial and social affordances of the digital. The theatre company uses the multi-modal potential website interfaces and the possibility to integrate hyperlinks to create an even greater sense of community in playwriting. At the bottom of the webpage, there is a DIY video in which Fishamble’s literary manager, Gavin Kostick, gives advice on how to pen tiny plays. With posting that video, the company widens the potential participatory community. Inviting further writers to become part of the competing community, Kostick lowers the threshold for potential new playwrights. At the same time, giving step-by-step advice on how to pen a tiny play increases accessibility to the competition and playwriting, even for laypeople.

There is not only the spirit of togetherness in competition and in playwriting, but also in the reception of Fishamble’s digital theatre, where yet another advantageous property of the digital is instrumentalised: the Internet functions as a channel of communication. Thirty-five of the 470 plays were selected to be published on the website. Not only do they revive an all too often forgotten way of bringing plays into the public, namely, by publishing them as closet plays, that is, as plays that do not necessarily need to be staged, but can, equally fruitfully, be read by a solitary reader or, sometimes, even be read out loud in a small, private reading group. They also allow reading audiences to easily access the respective “tiny closet plays” and to peruse them whenever they like.^[3] By way of their digital channel of distribution and by giving access to the plays free of charge, they develop new audiences. That Fishamble actually are able to forge communities of playreaders through play reading becomes clear when one takes a look at the bottom of the webpages on which the individual scripts can be found. Underneath each play, there is a section where people can leave comments. The structure of the homepage, on which Fishamble’s digital theatre is presented, invites an interactive communication between the recipients on the one hand, and between recipients and playwright on the other. Even though this conversation is likely stretched across space and time, the interface encourages the sharing of experiences and the exchange of opinions on each play – and thus enables a joint conversation among the new digital audience that is probably even more easily and readily established than, say, at the end of a performance in the analogue world.

The new reading audiences and user communities are further held together by the website’s multi-modality. The section “Meet the Team” gives photos of people behind and in front of the scenes and brief information on them (“Tiny Plays 24/7”). It approximates conventional printed programme notes that audiences can buy when visiting a performance. Here, they are provided for free and can be accessed 24/7 – even years later. The company also adds videos, for instance, the “Behind the Scenes” clip on the production of digital performances of ten selected plays for Tiny Plays 24/7. It features author interviews together with on- and off-stage photo and video material of the rehearsals and production phases. So, online audiences are multi-modally invited to become part of a theatrical community of playwrights, actors, and other theatre artists beyond the performance itself. They get seemingly exclusive insights behind the scenes, as users gain insider knowledge on the theatrical production and, by digital means, are allowed to feel part of this very production.

5. Online Performances as Reconsiderations of the “Essence” of Theatre and Performance

Several theatre scholars have considered the conceptual implications of the rapid increase in theatre digitalisation during the pandemic. Ramona Mosse et al. argue that “The COVID crisis has shown more generally that our established theoretical vocabulary for understanding theatrical performance has become insufficient for addressing the current situation of remote performance, social distancing and digital forms of engagement” (105; see also Liedke and Pietrzak-Franger). These observations clearly apply to Fishamble’s online theatre, too. The contributions in Tiny Plays 24/7 invite audiences and scholars alike to reconsider the essence of theatre and performance. They invite metatheatrical and metaperformative renegotiations of established concepts in drama and theatre theory, such as performance, presence, or bodily co-presence.

They also necessitate relating new concepts, such as distance and absence, to the traditional ones. With her tiny play “For How Janelle Monáe Once Made Me Feel,” Julia Marks wants to “explore how human relationships continue in a world that is distant and digital” (qtd. in Fishamble 3:34–3:40). The distance in her play is established through a situation in which three women are “playing with Barbies, surrounded by accessories.” The fact that they are not talking about interpersonal but general matters and that they are not talking with each other but are soliloquising alongside each other implies that they are physically apart, as the following excerpt shows:

MOLLY: We want and want, the internet is our dream house

SAM: Beauty butt mask/jade face roller/vitamin pack.

ADDY: Poetry collection/online yoga subscription/eco-friendly toothbrush

MOLLY: I want and want,

I am struggling to keep up with all the THINGS,

I am getting better and better!

SAM: Or maybe fuller and fuller!

Their successive thoughts overlap, however, as indicated by the slashes; and they semantically complement each other, which implies that the three women spend their time during the lockdown similarly. They excessively shop online or pass their time doing online yoga. And even though they spend their time physically separated from each other, they seem to engage in the same experiences, have similar feelings. Across all three monologues there is the tangible co-presence of loneliness, unhappiness, and digital fatigue (“ADDY: My unpacked suitcase is expanding and I am already thinking of the day when I will / pack my / things again / And be unhappy elsewhere”).

Similarly, while the remote performance of Tiny Plays 24/7 was marked by the spatio-temporal distance between actors and audiences characterising asynchronous online streaming, the artists of Fishamble still managed to establish other kinds of co-presence, associations, and reverberations – digital ones. In line with the eponymous intermedial reference to Janelle Monáe’s song “Make Me Feel,” they stylistically quoted – uncalled for in the script – the aesthetics of the singer’s respective YouTube video clip, which, too, is marked by hypersexualised aesthetics, by neon lights, and stage dances.

As digitalisation enables the copying, sharing, and the co-presence of zillions of online videos on platforms like YouTube, both explicit and implicit intermedial references in the playscript or production visualise the neoliberal overabundance of art digitally produced and compiled. Fishamble, in turn, exploit these digital cultures of the attention economy. This is also highlighted by the play’s imagery: the Barbie Dream House, which stands metonymically for neoliberal consumerism, is introduced and problematised. And yet the excessive online consumption of videos, performances, art, all of which are co-present on the Internet and seemingly accessible to anyone at any time, cannot make up for real-life relationships and being in bodily co-presence with other human beings, as the monologues suggest.

Analogously but more productively, Fishamble’s digital theatre experiments with “presence” as a key category in literary studies and theatre studies. Performances have been defined in terms of “physical co-presence of actors and audience” (Kolesch 251; my translation). But this does not apply to Tiny Plays 24/7, as the staging of the ten winning plays happened asynchronously online. The plays were produced in line with the governmental lockdown regulations – sometimes in actors’ homes, sometimes on stages. Afterwards, they were made accessible on Fishamble’s website to be quasi-communally consumed in the period between 28 July and 3 August 2020. And this, as the title says, 24/7.

If one conceptualises Fishamble’s online theatre, as discussed by Heidi Lucja Liedke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger, as “viral theatre,” it, too, “can be said to evoke and participate in the disruption of both extant generic expectations as well as practices of spectating. [. . .] As a consequence, the concept makes it possible to inspect and rethink the form and ‘essence’ of theatre – its liveness – and the way it engages with the spectator” (130). In the remote performance of Tiny Plays 24/7, extant generic expectations as well as practices of spectating are, indeed, disrupted: the established definition of performance as “physical co-presence” of actors and spectators and the idea that performances – unlike novels, films, or paintings – are produced through the interaction of all those present in a here and now of an encounter of living people no longer apply.^[4] Through the asynchronous online performance of Tiny Plays 24/7, therefore, there is only an imagined co-presence. With this, the performances problematise straightforward conceptions of presence, as in remote streaming theatrical presence and co-presence are simulated and, actually, marked by physical absences and fissures in perception.

Since August 2020, it has not even been possible for audiences to make these fissured experiences of presence and co-presence anymore. The online plays are meant to be as ephemeral as offline plays: after the streaming period, the link to Tiny Plays 24/7 expired; the performances were no longer accessible on Fishamble’s homepage. What is more, the performances are marked as absences there: fragments and traces of them are left; images of the recordings, impressions of their reception, and the links on Fishamble’s website to the scripts point to their transient existence, but also to their lasting effect. Even after the lockdowns, Fishamble continued to artistically develop their tiny-play culture, again combining their successful concepts of an online challenge, the form of the tiny play, digital media as channel of production, and varied topical subject matter: this time, regarding sustainable, ecological futures (“Tiny Plays for a Brighter Future Challenge”).

6. Conclusion: The Digital Turn in Playwriting, Curating, and Performance

Since the closing of the theatres of 2020/2021, there has been an “explosion in digital theater” (Fuchs, “Theater” 74). In order to gauge “the radical transformations theater was undergoing,” it has not only become vital to map the different forms of digital theatre since then; it is also important to explore its aesthetics, which is often based, on the one hand, on a thematisation of digital practices, concerns, and social forms and, on the other hand, on digital means of production, communication, and distribution. Yet it is not just theatre and performance that have changed with the explosion in digital theatre and the lockdowns, even though scholars often focus on this. As the study of Fishamble’s tiny plays shows, the digital turn in theatre has also engendered – and just as profoundly – changes in writing, curating, and producing plays.

The exploitation of new media and their formats have become part of the production, performance, and reception of plays. With the examination of the online work of Fishamble, I have demonstrated how the pandemic and its lockdowns have shaped theatre in the digital age in these respects. As has been always the case throughout theatre history, cultural circumstances averse to theatrical production and reception have helped to spur new kinds of theatrical production, artistic inventiveness, and the renewal of dramatic form – this time in the mode of the digital.

Fishamble managed to establish digital spaces of artistic freedom within the realities of tight physical restrictions. They creatively drew on a common transgeneric trend in digital culture: the quantification of literature, a turn towards brevity. Their 600-word plays, much like flash fiction, inspired artists to explore creative freedom within and by means of tight formal boundaries. They also drew on the old form of the closet play, rediscovering and shaping it for digital publication as well as a digital reading audience; and, with the help of the commentary sections on their website, they reawakened and digitally advertised the practice of play reading as both performative and communal practice.

Tiny Plays 24/7 also has possibly far-reaching implications for theatre and drama theory. Digital asynchronous performances such as these and their evocations of both new and (alienated, distorted) analogue theatre experiences make it necessary for drama scholars to complicate the relationship between audience and theatre, performative presence and absence, live experience and the “essence” of theatre. Digital theatre like Fishamble’s has also made it vital to reconsider the concepts of liveness, theatre, and performance. Perhaps scholars will have to go back to Jacques Derrida’s and Lehmann’s terms, in which performance is something that is never simply given, but has to be produced, manufactured, and constructed – predominantly cognitively, in reception (Kolesch 252). Certainly, scholars will have to look at new directions; maybe along the lines of Christina Papagiannouli, who conceptualises “experiential dramaturgies of online theatre” (175), or Bay-Cheng, who suggests that

we need finer distinctions for contemporary performance forms than the binary of “theatre” and “not theatre.” We might be served better by a conceptual framework that facilitates our understanding of the spectrum of theatricality across media, transformed in the era of Annos Coronavirus (ACV). One way is to view digital theatre, or “theatre without theatres” (to repurpose Alain Badiou’s derisive phrase), as a kind of translation of the mimetic, integrated space-time-action of traditional live forms into digital forms that, like their textual equivalents, simultaneously offer the original theatre (whether actual or imagined) and its mediated echo. Precisely because both translations and digital theatre have been dismissed as inherently inferior, inaccurate and flawed in comparison to an elevated original, this framing of translation as a function of mediated theatre offers both a way to understand contemporary theatre within and as media and, more importantly, to draw attention to the overlooked labour and aesthetics that shape performance transmissions on screen. (194)

No matter the direction: what is certain already is that theatre companies, authors, performers, audiences, and scholars alike have to think theatre anew under the auspices of the digital – by looking at performance in new ways, ways fit for the digital age.

Fishamble’s work can be seen as paradigmatic in several ways, highlighting directions not just for theatre-making in a postpandemic media ecology. Curating techniques developed with #TinyPlays, like the competition and the practice of online submissions of new dramatic works, have been made permanent by way of regularly opening digital submission windows (“Send Us Your Writing”). In addition to that, generic forms such as the short play and generic developments such as the rediscovery of the practice of reading plays are translated into postdigital forms. A case in point is Fishamble’s Transatlantic Commissions Residency Programme (2024), in which the company “supported the creation of four short plays [. . .] [, which] under the mentorship of [. . .] Dael Orlandersmith [could be expanded into] full-length plays, presented as staged readings in New York in June and Dublin in July 2024” (“Transatlantic Commissions Residency”; emphasis added).

More generally, many theatrical institutions have kept integrating digital forms that came to prominence during the pandemic. There is a trend towards highly elaborate and aesthetically appealing webpages (see, for example, Sharrock), on which productions are framed by a proliferation of digital paratext. Providing material about the play, trailers, production photos, behind-the-scenes videos, and digital information on cast and creatives (see, for example, the website of the Royal Shakespeare Company), digital paratext is not only used to advertise analogue performances; it is also still used to engender feelings of inclusion and community among, say, Shakespeare lovers around the globe, who browse the webpage and keep themselves informed, even if they cannot travel to Stratford and witness a costly production live and first-hand.

Undoubtedly, many of the forms of digital theatre explored by Fishamble and other companies might have already evolved before the pandemic. However, they arguably increased in number, visibility, formal scope, and technological advancement during the lockdown. Since then, they have been consolidated and developed. And in this sense, the restrictions of the lockdown will have a lasting impact on theatre and performance, shaping the genre of drama, the institution of the theatre, and the digital world itself.