Towards a Poetics of Interactive Theatre: Recognising Audience Agency Over Narrative

Abstract

This thesis examines the emerging discourse of interactivity within the field of theatre and performance studies. The early 21st century has seen a proliferation of theatrical works labelled immersive, participatory, or interactive. Such works are purported to offer audiences varying degrees of interactivity or agency, and many theatre makers have cited video games as inspiration for the experiences they have sought to create. However, contemporary scholarship is yet to reach a consensus as to what makes video games interactive, and how – or if – the experiences of interactivity and agency in video games might be adapted for theatrical application. Without this understanding, theatre makers risk failing to meet the expectations of audiences that are growing increasingly accustomed to the agential possibilities afforded them by digital works.

Using three case studies from ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis analyses the practice of games designers and theatre makers to ask: how might practitioners create works of interactive theatre that recognise audience agency over narrative? Drawing upon a theoretical framework from the field of game studies, this thesis finds such theory highly applicable to both the analysis and development of interactive theatre. It demonstrates how theatre works might be flexibly structured to facilitate verbal interaction between an audience participant and improvising performer in order for audience contributions to be integrated into the story and world of the performance. The significance of this study lies in its finding that, despite limitations inherent to the theatrical paradigm, works of interactive theatre are better-suited than video games to recognising audience agency over narrative, due to the superiority of human performers over current digital story systems when interpreting physical and verbal interaction.