Theater in the Internet Age

Over the weekend I heard a radio interview with famous german theater actor Rolf Boysen. He will turn 90 the next days and had some great insights to share.

However, the main point that struck me was not so much any specifics he mentioned but the my question what the theater would look like in the Internet Age with Twitter, Facebook, Youtube.

The worldview in almost all theater plays today, especially classical ones – and Rolf Boysen is especially known for playing King Lear – is about people interacting face to face in a real, physical world.

Today people are more and more interacting via email, facebook, twitter, skype, i.e. not in a real world but in a virtual world.

So would theater in the Internet Age being people exchangig tweets, would we need actors at all and would they just sit in front of PCs to write their messages to big screens?

Or would the actors actually read their texts aloud?

What kind of training would actors need in the future?

And what about the audience, wouldn’t it be very boring just reading text from screens?

Would the audience actually still assemble at a theater as a physical location or would they just meet in the Internet to watch / read the play at home ?

Could we actually start by adapting classical plays for Twitter ?

(and by doing so discover what is lost in a virtual world)