Theatre Journal

On screen, a box set opened the play slowly spinning on its axis in a void of black space, exposing its sides, roof and base before temporarily settling in the frontal perspective characteristic of conventional theatre. In a boundary-breaking hybrid live/online production of Shomit Dutta’s new play Stumped, Original Theatre Online displayed other three-dimensional viewpoints of the moving image in a methodology that not only explored the digital screen as a liminal zone with no fixed or determined a priori conditions of space, time and causality, but also reconceived, repurposed and politicized the ontological instability of the in-screen viewer within this liminal landscape between the live and the online, opening up new discursive and political possibilities for the digital screen.

Stumped is a darkly comic play that imagines the two cricket-obsessed Nobel Prize winners Samuel Beckett (Stephen Tompkinson) and Harold Pinter (Andrew Lancel) as waiting batsmen in a brilliantly witty spin on Waiting for Godot and The Dumb Waiter. Act One is set on the balcony of the pavilion, and Act Two finds them on the village green drunkenly waiting for a lift from a stranger called ‘Doggo’ who may never come.

Filmed live from the home of English cricket—Lord’s—Stumped was originally meant to have been filmed in front of a live audience and simultaneously live-streamed from Lord’s on September 10, 2022. But due to the national event of Queen Elizabeth II dying on September 8, 2022, a pause was placed on the presence of a live audience and the live streaming from the real Lord’s Cricket Ground. Notwithstanding the cancellation of the live event, the ghostly presence of the real Lord’s and the echoes of a live audience and live streaming shadow, haunt and frame the reality of the play. [End Page 362]

Insisting on the presence of the real to act as a counterbalance to the hegemony of the virtual, Stumped’s proscenium arch was constructed as a dark, heavy wooden picture frame encircling and framing the set of an English cricket pavilion drenched in the vibrant color palette and design of René Magritte’s blue skies and white clouds, reminiscent of the very pompier trompe-l’oeil backcloth to Beckett’s play Happy Days. On the back wall hung another three-dimensional picture that framed and contained a 3D model—the front of which opened to remove real props—of the pavilion. This literal picture framing of a representation of the real, made visible to the viewer that this play is a picture of the real, which consequently emphasized the artificiality of the reality seen.

Original Theatre Online also made the constructed nature of reality visible to the audience in a less literal and more mechanical way, by oscillating the viewer’s perception and sense of being through a palimpsestuous layering of the real and unreal realms in the planes of the digital screen. At the end of Act One, the audience saw Beckett step through multiple real and unreal planes in the digital screen; as he stepped off the stage, out of the picture frame, into the void, into the live audience, onto an imaginary cricket pitch to play imaginary cricket at the real Lord’s Cricket Ground. The viewer could choose between any combination of the real, unreal, or imagined realms in which to place their own Beckett in space and time. In making visible the ontological instability that characterized the piece, Original Theatre turned an existential no-man’s-land into a possible playground for an audience to explore other spatial and temporal geographies.

This existential playground was also maintained by alternatively reversing, revolving, or dissolving the fourth wall. In Act One, the live/online audience watched the characters on stage watch a cricket match played in the auditorium, and simultaneously the characters watched the audience...