I hope there will be future attempts at this form and that their audiences will be treated with more respect in this bi-directional medium. If audience members are ‘heckling’ to the annoyance of the performers, management or other followers there are surely more subtle ways of requesting that they desist?

‘Ben’

You’ve already hit on some of the problems. Characters using tweets like texts/DMs (we have to believe that “third party” characters don’t see them); characters tweeting to each other whilst in the same room (again we see them, but those characters “not present” can’t); characters tweeting their “inner voice” to the audience, which no other character sees.

Interestingly, the “inner voice” aspect of tweets does make twitter drama lean more towards the radio model than the stage model – unless we think of them as restoration-style “asides”, or as “micro monologues”.

However, the big problem comes in how to portray dialogue between two or more characters, whilst excluding other characters from the information being tweeted. In other forms of drama that is easily achieved by only having certain characters physically present in a “scene”. The audience then accepts that absent characters just do not hear the conversation.

What we have to deal with is a drama that is not only conducted in one long scene – where all characters are present at all times (albeit virtually) – but where all can see/hear what all other characters are saying to each other. I’m quite a sure a drama could be written around such a premise – but it certainly wouldn’t be like this one.

Actually, the choice of Romeo & Juliet for this experiment is important one. Not only is it one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, but the plot details are well known to many people as it is also a regular school text. Arguably, if they had adapted a lesser known drama, then (a) the audience would have been much smaller, and (b) people would not be able to rely on background knowledge of the plot to allow them to cut through the confusion caused by the “convention problems”. Hence, we shouldn’t judge the success or failure of “twitter drama” based on this experiment alone (although I sure many people will).

The “product placement” fiasco is an interesting one – as it essentially turns the whole piece into an advert. Product placement in television drama has a long and rather undistinguished history. Regulations have existed in the UK, to prevent its use, for a long time – although advertising firms have often been able to get around the rules by various means. Unfortunately, the rules are now going to be relaxed – so goodness knows how UK TV will develop. The future certainly doesn’t look good.

Everyone knows that performances have to be paid for somehow (whether by ticket sales, tax-derived subsidies, commercial sponsorship, or a mixture of all three). However – as has been shown, turning a character’s dialogue tweet into an advert just ruins the drama.

Of course the medium itself doesn’t lend itself to advertising – as any tweets that push a product, or brand, feel like spam. In theatre, or at concerts, the signs of sponsorship are limited to banner adverts in the building, and notices in the printed programme. I’m sure that if, in this case, the sponsorship notices had been limited to the Such Tweet Sorrow website, then nobody would have minded. Sponsor adverts can also be visible on any photo site, video clip site, or audio clip site that the characters might link to – without being too obtrusive, or distracting. But product placement within the dialogue? Nooooooo!

I haven’t ‘quit’, just relegated the characters to a list. And it wasn’t on the ‘balcony scenes’, it was on a culmination of two weeks worth of experience. I will still be following the story, I hope I’m over-reacting.

I don’t believe that within context (as I am taking #suchtweet) anyone seeing the stage performance version of the scene would find it inartistic and stilted, I think they would find it expressing sentiments within its form – the form allowing for suspension of disbelief, time and space, not broken by any other formal constraints.

The balcony scene here is broken by logical constraints if it pretends to realism, which some of it has. If it is not intentionally so, that’s fine, but the confusion is disruptive.

If that’s all anyone saw of a stage performance they’d think it was unartistic and stilted as well. “It is the east and Juliet is the sun.”

Anyway, cya. I’ll miss your tweets in the hashtag.