Guest Blog: Rob Myles On THE SHOW MUST GO ONLINE

In The Shakespeare Deck, I share a definition of Kairos. It's an idea from classical rhetoric, and one Shakespeare would've been taught in school. It means, loosely, "doing the right thing at the right time".

Shakespeare used this idea to great dramatic effect: when Antony produces the will of Caesar, or when Lady Macbeth invokes their lost child to galvanise Macbeth's resolve. While both these actions are cravenly manipulative, Plato believed pure rhetoric could only ever be used for good - and Kairos, too, could make things better.

I had my own moment of Kairos a month ago, though I didn't realise it at the time. I lost a gig that would have taken me through April, and I soon realised I was one of the first of many. On Friday, I sent out a tweet saying I'd like to start an online Shakespeare reading group in response to Covid19, and stream it so people could watch. I expected a handful might be interested.

Within 24 hours, we had 150 actors who wanted to take part. I called on Sarah Peachey, my producing partner, to turn the idea into a project. In addition to theatre, both Sarah and I work in innovation, as a project manager and creative lead respectively. Our experience in new product development and rapid prototyping agency-side meant we were used to high pressure, tight deadlines, and running pre-production and production in parallel.

Our intention was to create a community that could respond to the growing crisis by creating a truly live experience - performed live, watched live, with interactions between actors and audience in the form of interval and post-show discussions. With the help of friends, we wrangled together a global cast, who had just two and a half days to figure out this new medium (a timeframe remarkably similar to original practice).

Within six days, our first show went live. The major London theatres shut down only a day or two before. We were spotted in the Guardian, Time Out, and on the BBC's Newsnight, in Playbill and on NPR in the States. We had over 700 watching live, and the first show has now been viewed more than 46,000 times on YouTube.

It's been a 24/7 endeavour for me and Sarah ever since. Now in our fourth week, we have over 1,000 people on our mailing list to receive weekly casting calls and updates. We're lucky that people are beginning to come forward to offer behind the scenes support, to keep this runaway train on the rails, and help us continue to improve and grow.

We were inundated with enquiries from theatre companies, universities and drama schools around the world; to date, we've given advice and guidance to over 20 of them.

Our audience also helped drive our innovation. They asked us to add character names on screen to help follow the story, and they demanded a Patreon, so we created an opt-in hardship fund for the actors involved (all of whom give their time and talent freely to entertain in times of crisis).

We knew from the beginning that this was about bringing people together - we have a mix of experienced professionals, recent graduates, experienced amateurs and first timers in our casts. Those who perform one week can be found in the live chat the next.

Our live self-named "Groundlings" react and respond in the moment to the actors' ingenuity and resourcefulness, play games around the play, and share their own knowledge and expertise. It's a wonderful thing to behold. What's more, many have shared moving stories of the sense of connection they feel in the era of self-isolation. If you love Shakespeare or you're just curious, love theatre more generally, or just want something different in these strange times, there's a place for you.

It feels like we've been doing this forever, but it's only the beginning. Performing a play a week means we'll be doing this until November, and we believe this project will have a life beyond lockdown. Global casts that would otherwise never get to work with each other, sharing scenes from thousands of miles away, a sense of closeness and intimacy with the actors speaking soliloquies, audience members discovering one another across continents in the live chat... All these unique advantages will remain.

The Show Must Go Online offers togetherness, shared experience, live performances, and the ability to discover Shakespeare's plays in new ways. If you want to be a part of that, we'd love for you to join us, either as a viewer or a performer. You can sign up by hitting "take part" on the show's homepage, or simply subscribe on YouTube and set a reminder using the bell icon.

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