Live-cast and recorded theatre (LCRT) such as National Theatre Live has expanded rapidly into a major industry since its launch in 2009. In academic terms, this development has been discussed predominantly in the context of audience demographics. The development merits, however, a reassessment of the liveness debate launched with the seminal contributions by Peggy Phelan's 1993 book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance and Philip Auslander's 1999 study Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Auslander argues that before mediatization in the forms of sound recording and film, all audiences encountered performance in a mode that we now call "live". However, that term was not yet relevant then, because it makes sense only in relation to an opposite, such as the "mediatized".1 In this sense, the live does not precede the mediatized and cannot claim superiority because it came first. 2 Once the live emerges as a category of experience, in opposition to the mediatized, those people who are representatives of the live in production or reception contexts develop an anxiety about the perceived threat that the live is allegedly exposed to from the mediatized. 3 They address that anxiety by attributing higher value to the live by arguing that it is real, whereas the mediatized is not real. 4 An alternative is the attempt to make the live as alike to the mediatized as possible. to the young spectators' responses to the liveness of the Othello performance, which includes their references to "directness, immediacy, responsibility, realness," Reason argues that it is necessary to include in the discussion "the wider social phenomenon and experience (…), the public experience of the event." 22 He concludes:the experience of being in a theatre audience is always going to be largely about something very different from simply sitting down and watching a play". (…) the acuteness of this social experience was heightened by the live nature of the theatre performance -the real presence of the actors, the danger of something going wrong, the risk of missing something all provide an urgency to the situation, increasing levels of tension and potential discord within the audience. Like the complex realness of the live actors, so is the theatre audience a heightened, intense and peculiarly real environment.
23Paterson and Stevens discuss liveness in the simulcast phenomenon on the basis of NT Live, and propose a "new conceptual framework that can be termed 'Super Bowl Dramaturgy,' whereby the qualities of the 'live' performance are subsumed within a dramaturgical logic that parallels the branding, staging, and viewing experiences of a major mediatized sporting event like the American Super Bowl." 24 As part of that discussion, they argue that the advent of the simulcast implies that "live" is being re-defined to include reference to "a live screening where the spectator can view the performance in the same temporal moment that it occurs, though they may be separated by vast spatial distances. to theatre may in any one era, the of...
