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

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.