#TinyPlayChallenge: Medial, Formal, and Social Affordances of Digital Theatre in Times of Lockdown

Abstract This article enquires into the intricacies of digital lockdown theatre. By way of example, I explore #TinyPlayChallenge and Tiny Plays 24/7 by the Dublin-based theatre company Fishamble: The New Play Company. During the lockdown in spring 2020, Fishamble prompted playwrights from Ireland and around the globe to write so-called tiny plays, 600-word plays in English. Out of 470 submitted plays, ten were produced and broadcast round the clock online for one week in summer 2020 as Tiny Plays 24/7 . The experience and experiments of #TinyPlayChallenge serve as a case study to analyse the ways in which the combination of digitalisation and lockdown theatre engendered new artistic realities at times of enforced individual and institutional restraints – and possibly beyond, fostering dramatic innovation and ways of negotiating new theatrical and sociopolitical challenges. These processes of innovation and negotiation take place within marked fields of tension: #TinyPlayChallenge explores spaces of artistic freedom within tight formal boundaries (word limit and thematic prompts) and forms of social participation in environments of isolation (digital watching or reading communities). From an intermedial perspective, the article highlights the formal innovations of theatre during lockdown. Finally, it delineates some of the new social conditions of digital playwriting and reception which might have come to stay.