March 30, 2018 Virtual Play: Beckettian Experiments in Virtual Reality contemporarytheatrereview.org/2018/beckettian-experiements-in-virtual-reality/ Nicholas E. Johnson and Néill O’Dwyer The past ten years have seen extensive experimentation with Beckett and new technological media at Trinity College Dublin. Research projects have included the stage adaptation and installation of a teleplay (Ghost Trio, 2007), the HD digital video exploration of two teleplays (Abstract Machines, 2010, including new versions of …but the clouds… and Nacht und Träume), and numerous smaller projects involving audio and video within the remit of “fundamental research” at the Samuel Beckett Laboratory (2013–present). The most recent project, Virtual Play , explores Beckett’s Play (1963) within FVV (free-viewpoint video), a form of user-centred VR (virtual reality). This project, reflecting interdisciplinary and cross-faculty collaboration between the V-SENSE project (within the School of Computer Science and Statistics) and the School of Creative Arts, has made high-impact contributions in both FVV research and Beckett Studies, and has now been recognised at European level, receiving first prize at the 2017 New European Media Awards. After introducing the idea behind the project in a short video, this intervention addresses the main outcomes of this research for both Beckett Studies and the study of VR. The researchers believe that the project revealed not only new ways to think about Beckett and Play, as might be expected from any new production of his text, but also insights that extend the existing field of research in Beckett and technology. The use of Beckett in this context also led to new thinking about VR acting and the VR audience, research which is ongoing for the computer scientists involved. Finally, Virtual Play has demonstrated some structural characteristics of the type of research ecosystem that might allow such interdisciplinary collaborations to flourish, visions which may have implications for the way that universities organise research between the separate but overlapping fields of “creative technologies” and “creative arts practice”. Samuel Beckett’s emblematic response to any technology or medium of dissemination — visible across his novels, plays, radio plays, teleplays, and his single film — was to think deeply about the ontology of that medium and then proceed to explore its boundaries. A thread running through all investigations undertaken at Trinity College Dublin since the mid- 2000s has been a continuation of that tradition, while recognising that the wide availability of new digital media, from the internet and YouTube to digital video and podcasting, has fundamentally altered the conditions of reception for Beckett’s works, and thus provides new affordances for exploration. Of special interest, led by the thinking and research of Matthew Causey (founder of the Arts Technology Research Laboratory at TCD and the director of both Ghost Trio and Abstract Machines), has been the resonance between Beckett’s analogue televisual spaces and the ontology of the theatre, as well as between 1 1/10