Shakespeare’s New Mediators: Theatre Space and the Celebrity Actor in Broadcast Paratexts

Live theatre broadcast paratexts – the trailers, short films, interviews, and extras streamed alongside a mediated theatrical production – frequently make use of interior theatre spaces. In this article, I examine the interpretive significance of these spaces, and the celebrity actors who inhabit them. Drawing from the claim that paratexts offer cinema audiences ‘privileged access’, I trace a history of transitional spaces inhabited by high-profile performers using three broadcast examples: the private hotel suite in Richard Burton’s Hamlet (1964), the backstage dressing room in Tom Hiddleston’s Coriolanus (2014), and the apron of the stage in Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet (2015). I suggest that the illusion of proximity to the celebrity actor, and of transgression into ‘off-limits’ spaces, heightens the interpretive stakes of these framing elements. As such, this article demonstrates how broadcast paratexts not only mediate a theatrical performance but disrupt binaries of theatrical space to offer interpretive thresholds to cinema audiences.