Introduction: Bernard Shaw and New Media

During the summer of 2015, George Bernard Shaw's drama became "new media" in a broadly recognizable and distinctly twenty-first-century way. On 14 May, the Royal National Theatre broadcast a live digital feed of Simon Godwin's high-profile production of Man and Superman to movie theaters and art centers across the United Kingdom and Europe. Over the coming weeks and months, a recording of that feed would be screened in dozens of locations, from Manchester to Madison, and from Auckland to Ann Arbor, during what the NT Live series calls "encore presentations." At all of these screenings, audiences watched and listened for approximately 225 minutes as Ann Whitefield (Indira Varma) chased Jack Tanner (Ralph Fiennes) to hell and back.

They also saw and heard the audience gathered at London's Lyttleton Theatre on 14 May. In a manner similar to the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD series—one model for the NT's own broadcasts, which commenced in 2009—producers supplemented the feed of the actors' performance with views of the West End audience settling into their seats before and after the show and during intermission. Due to Man and Superman's notoriously extreme length, cinema audiences were deprived of (or perhaps spared) the preshow introductions, interviews, and short informative films that usually accompany the performance feed. They were, however, shown advertisements promoting NT Live's mission: to distribute "the best of British theatre" across the globe, using cutting-edge digital technologies to produce the feeling of synchronous, collective, embodied reception that was for so long identified as live theater's distinguishing trait—and sometimes still is, despite the compelling arguments made by performance scholars that, as Sarah Bay-Cheng puts it, "theater is media."¹

According to NT Live's publicity, the plays are not all that is "the best" about its broadcasts. Because the cameras were so "carefully positioned throughout the auditorium" at the Lyttleton, every cinema spectator had "the 'best seat in the house' view"—a view that is in fact composed of multiple views, shot by multiple cameras, digitally stitched into what feels like a single, seamless perspective.² Shaw devotees unable to attend a live performance in London could experience the "liveness" of an NT Live screening—which, depending on one's priorities and one's appreciation of cinematic close-up shots, might even seem better than the "real thing" at the Lyttleton.³ Attempting to leverage both relative novelty (digital broadcast technologies) and relative familiarity (a modern classic in a high-profile production, led by an established star of stage and screen), NT Live was betting that Bernard Shaw and new media would be a winning combination. It was a good bet, though the combination of Shakespeare and this particular new medium has turned out to be a more popular and lucrative one for NT Live. (Its Hamlet alone has attracted one million viewers and counting—exponentially more than Man and Superman is likely to reach, even if NT Live does offer more encore screenings in the coming years.⁴ This is an unsurprising outcome, given Shakespeare's undiminished global renown and the production's very starry star, Benedict Cumberbatch; it's also one that would especially irk the Bard-bashing Shaw).

It is more than apt that producers and users of this new medium would incorporate Shaw into their efforts to build a twenty-first-century theater audience via satellite. Shaw himself was intensely interested in the emergent and established media of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; moreover, early producers of his era's developing mass media had also bet on his appeal, as readers of previously published Shaw scholarship know well. From the BBC's earliest days, the radio service incorporated into its programming Shaw's public talks, debates, plays, and opinions on pronunciation—though not without serious behind-the-microphone tensions, as L. W. Conolly has shown. Perhaps coincidentally, almost a century ago the very first of Shaw's plays transmitted for a geographically distributed audience was also Man and Superman, an excerpt of which the BBC appears to have broadcast on 1 December 1923...