My thoughts on Online Theatre

 My thoughts on Online Theatre

(Photo by Felix Mooneeramon Unsplash)

Welcome back to my blog! In this instalment I will be discussing my thoughts on Online Theatre. Online Theatre has been around for a few years, however due to the pandemic Online Theatre has become popular due to Theatres being closed , as a result of the pandemic.

During the lockdown I was involved in two pieces of online theatre my first experience

with Online theatre was with a theatre company called: Ethereal Theatre, which is run by Mark Zayat and Dana Hudson. During the early days of the first lockdown they had an online monologue slam series which took place over a few weeks, each week they had a different cast of actors who would perform either one or two contrasting monologues.

This was a really fun experience, especially as taking part in the monologue slam took my mind of being in lockdown and the pandemic in general. Through out the monologue slam series a variety of monologues were performed, from classic pieces from Shakespeare, to modern pieces, also a few actors decided to write and perform original pieces or share a work in progress

The monologue series was streamed live on YouTube, something interesting happened, right before I was due to come on to the live stream I had a huge adrenaline dump, and I was like “why

is this happening to me?” I was in the comfort of my own room. I guess even though I did a live performance over YouTube, the fact of the matter is. I did a live performance and there were people at home watching me perform.

My second experience was completely different. I will tell you about it and how the opportunity came about. So I was scrolling through Twitter, yes, Twitter again. I was scrolling through

twitter and I came across a casting call for this upcoming theatre festival called:  Show Face Festival. 

I sent over an e-mail to the festival organisers, with a copy of my CV and spotlight link. I heard back from the artistic director of the festival, Lauren Elizabeth. She said she would love for me to be a part of the festival, and cast me in a play called: Don't Worry You'll Be All Right.  A piece written by George Morris.

I read the script. I enjoyed it, the first thing that came to mind was “how on earth are we gonna do this?” Because the script was crazy!  After a few days I had my first session with the director of

the piece:  Theodore Spurden, he explained how everything  was going to work. 

So each character is in their own environment, and we recored all our dialogue individually. We then sent it to Theodore and he edited it all together. I did my rehearsal with Theodore over zoom, we did some character work, we talked about the world of the play etc. I went through the script and discussed my dialogue with Theodore, and he gave my some notes on how to improve on what I presented.

It was nice doing  a rehearsal over zoom but nothing, and I mean nothing beats being in a room with your fellow actors and the director, nothing beats that energy!