“After the Tempest”: Assessing audience response through Playback Theatre

Abstract

Audience response is linked to a production's intentionality towards its audience. Playback Theatre is a form of community theatre designed to facilitate the audience’s interrelations. Applied as a method of reflection, it can explore tendencies and dynamics in specific audiences. This project analyses the impact that a theatrical play had on its spectators, as this was revealed through Playback Theatre. The play involved was Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, which raises existential themes: trust, alliance, betrayal and revenge. The production was based on a two-part adaptation of the play for six performers. In the first part, the performers enacted their roles, while in the second, they “de-roled” and improvised on the audiences’ reflections. Seventy narrations in thirteen performances were recorded and analysed with the consent of the audience members. The data were assessed by the method of “Narrative Reticulation”, which focuses on four performance areas: guidance, atmosphere, spontaneity and story. Further “Thematic Analysis” of the shared stories disclosed those themes of the play that affected the audience. The results show the potency of The Tempest to foster intellectual engagement, interpersonal bonding and psychic resilience in its audience, the prominence of forgiveness versus revenge being the essential issue.