Shakespeare's works have inspired innovation for over 400 years. Now, 5G could make his plays even more immersive.

 

Royal Shakespeare Company actors take direction on stage.

Cate Gillon/Staff/Getty Images

• The Royal Shakespeare Company has been using tech to transform The Bard's work for years.
• In 2022, it began experimenting with 5G to look for ways it could help augment theater.
• The company sees 5G as a way to offer immersive theater experiences and enhance live shows.
• This article is part of "5G Playbook," a series exploring one of our time's most important tech innovations. 

William Shakespeare has been a catalyst for innovation for over 400 years. During his lifetime, the English playwright invented new words, phrases, and tropes, and his plots have inspired other artists to conceive of their own boundary-pushing masterpieces. The staging of his work also allows creators to test what's possible — often to stunning effect. 

"His stories have always worked on new platforms," Sarah Ellis, the director of digital development at the Royal Shakespeare Company, told Insider, explaining that Shakespeare's works have "a resilience that allows them to adapt to really different contexts and allows artists to be in a perpetual state of discovery."

The Royal Shakespeare Company is a theater group based in Stratford-upon-Avon, England — Shakespeare's birthplace. Despite the company's notable location, Ellis and her colleagues are pursuing a future in which live theater is not bound by the physical constraints of a place. And the way to do that, she said, is through technology.

"Today, we are not just a stage in Stratford-upon-Avon," Ellis said. "We are a multiplatform organization and the storytelling will reflect that." 

Using 5G to deliver a new Shakespeare experience

In her position, Ellis examines how cutting-edge technologies can expand the possibilities of theater, facilitate the vision of artists, and engage the interest of new audiences. 

One innovation that's captured her attention is the fifth generation of wireless network technology, more commonly known as 5G. This cellular standard enables greater bandwidth and faster data transfers than its predecessors; in ideal conditions, wireless providers say 5G may be up to 200 times faster than the 4G network.

The Royal Shakespeare Company is at the start of its 5G journey. In 2022, Ellis and her colleagues collaborated with Ericsson, a Swedish telecommunications company, to experiment with its 5G lab.

The two companies discussed key scenarios where they thought 5G could augment theater. For example, they examined how 5G could be useful for distributing real-time performances across multiple digital platforms and reaching audiences with their own 5G-ready devices. The 5G lab experience also yielded another use for the technology — the collaborators realized it could connect audience members within the theater space itself.

"If you have a group of people together, you can also connect them individually through that 5G infrastructure," Ellis said. "That's an interesting idea to us — how can we make theater even more of a collective experience?" 

These experiments further convinced Ellis — who already saw the potential of the technology and gave a talk on it in 2019 — that 5G could be a useful tool in the company's theater-making tool kit. 

"The thing about 5G is that it's a heavy pipeline — it can run a lot of data very effectively and locally," Ellis said. "Real-time technology, latency, and the promise that data can flow really robustly are critical for what we want to do."

The Royal Shakespeare Company hasn't used 5G in production yet, but the deployment is on "a very close horizon," Ellis said. Expanded 5G coverage is necessary to unlock artistic potential: real-time theater distributed to mobile phones at the moment it's performed. This goal requires 5G because "when data breaks down, you break the connection between the artist and audience," she said. 

The Royal Shakespeare Company has been using tech to innovate for years

The famed theater company understands the potential of technology because of past experimentation. Its digital arm supports research and development. Its first large-scale technology project, an online play and world-building experience that unfolded across different formats, called Midsummer Night's Dreaming, was released in 2013. 

In 2016, the Royal Shakespeare Company incorporated a digital avatar into a real-time performance of "The Tempest," Shakespeare's last play. During the play, the actor who played the sprite Ariel wore a motion-capture suit covered in sensors that collected movement and facial-expression data. This informed the movements of the avatar, which was projected around the theater. 

In 2021, the Royal Shakespeare Company again took on the material of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and produced "Dream," an online performance audiences could access on a computer, mobile phone, or tablet. During this live, immersive experience, viewers encountered avatars of the play's fanciful characters in a virtual forest; these were also based on the data captured by actors in motion-capture suits. 

A Royal Shakespeare Company actor performs in "Dream."

Stuart Martin/Royal Shakespeare Company

Because of its capabilities, Ellis thinks 5G can push forward the work already set into motion and "deepen these stories in the online space."

"We're not short on ideas or short on the content we want to create," she said. "But we're aware of the fact that to deliver on the innovative artistic vision and ambition we have, we need an infrastructure that's resilient and robust." 

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