international when due to time zone differences and logistics reasons, it takes hours,

months, and up to years for the original simultaneous broadcast to be transmitted to

culturally and sociologically different places. It is also intermedial in that the hybrid
of theatre, film, television, and radio refuses any clear-cut distinction between media
in the field of cultural production. These changes leave NT Live’s claim to be live in
a dangling position. What, then, is lost and gained in this ‘impossible balancing act’
which, according to the NT’s former artistic director Nicholas Hytner, is ‘driven . . . by
the contradictory ambition to make theatre for the privileged few on the night, and to
spread that privilege as widely as possible’(272)?
This article investigates how as a new form of international and intermedial performance,
National Theatre Live adapts the key concept ‘liveness’ between multiple
frames of production and reception. By tracing Ivo van Hove’s Hedda Gabler from the
stage of the National Theatre to the screens of NT Live in China, I argue that its
liveness is intertwined with the connections and variations between communities of
spectators, revealing each experience’s distinctive condition and locality rather than
being simply a token of exact reproduction. This process concerns a series of intervention,
integration, negotiation, and reconciliation in which the expanded spatial and
temporal dimensions created by NT Live point to the cultural and political potentials
and limitations of liveness in the age of digitalization and multimedia.
The choice of van Hove’s revival of Hedda Gabler comes primarily with the belief that
the way the director and his crew strengthened the ‘autopoietic feedback loop’ across
the proscenium arch manages to grasp liveness as a politically significant and contingent
issue (Fischer-Lichte 59). My analysis begins by considering liveness in its strictest theatrical
sense—as the co-presence of actors and spectators in the same space at the same
time. This definition appears to be the kernel to theatre’s survival against new forms of
mediatization. As Jerzy Grotowski proclaims, ‘the closeness of the living organism’ is
the ‘only one element of which film and television cannot rob the theatre’ (40). Much
contemporary theory and practice reckons the empowering, transformative, and subversive
power of live performance. The dispute between such championing of unmediated liveness, in
particular by Peggy Phelan, would encounter a sceptical response from
media scholars like Philip Auslander. Their debate forms the foundation of many later
endeavours to redefine theatre broadcast’s ‘live’ quality despite inevitable denial of corporeal co-
presence, most notably in Martin Baker’s monograph on livecast and articles
published in Adaptation. Recounting mainly the experience of UK audiences who watch
the performance in live cinemas on the night of the broadcasting, they accentuate the
broadcasts’ temporal simultaneity with the theatrical origin and find a repudiation of
‘here’ and a prioritization of ‘now’ (Hitchman 174). Cochrane and Bonner are among
the few that notice ‘the actuality … is delay for the majority of viewers’ (123). In almost
all countries outside Europe, the encore screenings—meaning that a recorded performance was
screened at a later date on a special occasion or out of popular demand—are
in fact the norm rather than the rarity. What the international audience members experience thus
requires more than a rebalancing of Walter Benjamin’s auratic elements,
which Hitchman considers adequate to function as liveness’s two constituents.
Compared with the geographically restricted temporal-simultaneity-as-liveness,
the ‘buzz’ (Baker 65) between audience members within ‘communities of perception’