Building a Remote Theatre

I was lucky enough to spend most of January at the Hands up Project’s educational space in Cairo. One of the things I was doing was helping to set up a remote theatre space so that plays could be performed live from one of the rooms to classrooms around the world.

As you can see from the images below you don’t need much to do this - a laptop with an internet connection and enough space behind the laptop so that the actors can be both onstage (in front of the camera) and offstage (not visible to the audience). These are the basic requirements.

It very much helps to create the illusion of theatre if you also have a plain coloured wall with no pictures on it in the camera’s field of vision, or, if you want to use virtual background images most effectively, a green screen. We’d also recommend putting the laptop on top of a chair or a pile of books on a table, so that the actors don’t have to crouch down when they speak.

Post performance discussion with the audience is a really important part of the process.

Our first play was a play that the late, great Benjamin Zephaniah wrote especially to be performed remotely and to be included in our book ‘Doing Remote Theatre’. We all had masses of fun doing it and it was a fantastic learning experience for us all too. One of the actors, Marah, made this lovely ‘behind the scenes’ video.

After about a week of rehearsal we were ready to perform it and we did this lots of times to different schools in Spain. Below you can see one of those live performances. I’ve included in the video some bits at the beginning and the end of the performance so that you can see how it might fit into a class.

Sadly, Benjamin is no longer with us and couldn’t see this brilliant performance of his play. He did come to the first ever remote performance of ‘A passport for what?’ though - back in 2022 and stayed for this interesting post performance discussion about why he wrote the play (see below)

Thanks so much to Yamen, Jabber, Wadia, Marah, and Lama for doing such a great job with the performance (and making the whole process so much fun!) And thanks too to Safa for doing the sound and Sulaiman for other technical support.

We hope that there will be many more remote perfomances from our space to other schools around the world. We’d love to hear from you if want to arrange that. Please add a comment below about what you thought of the play, and if you were involved in it please tell us what it was like for you to be in it.