Shakespeare in Cyborg Theatre: Immersive VR Theatre and the Cyborg-Subject

It is only recently that VR has become one of the most sought out technologies to create a narrative experience. However, as David Z. Saltz points out, ‘scholars and practitioners have yet to settle on a name to describe performances that incorporate digital media’. In this article, I extend Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s concept of ‘cyborg theatre’ to the three technological retellings of Shakespeare – To Be With Hamlet, Hamlet 360, and The Under Presents: Tempest – and demonstrate immersive VR theatre as a site where the possibilities of shifting subjectivity materialize. The first section explores the nature of VR in theatre through its central function. Focusing on my experiences of the productions, I explore the cyborgean intersections in VR theatre via the sense of immersion, and highlight how the immersive power of VR incites reflections on the impact of new technologies on the body and the subject of the audience. Based on an examination of immersion, the second section focuses on the audience’s embodied subjectivity and argues immersive VR theatre as a site where alternative corporeal and technological configurations could be tested out. I am especially interested in how sensory immersion in VR, unlike existing claims on it, relates to the materiality as well as the imitative representation of a fictional world.