Exciting as these developments are, I am at least as interested in "interactivity" as a metaphor, for a particular experience of engagement, a quality of imaginative and intellectual participation. To put it another way, the mechanism of choosing ultimately seems less important than its implications. An on-screen hypertext literally demands that the reader piece it together, creating a (provisional) structure by her interaction with it. It transforms reception into co-creation. The metaphoric hypertext, whatever its form, challenges its interlocutor to discover connections, to pursue associations, to find or forge links. It is a text reimagined as a shifting network of possibilities, with the reader/spectator as indispensable collaborator in their realization.
This redefinition is particularly suited to theatre. And I am thinking here not only of the provisional nature of performance (never the same show twice), or its literal dependence on the presence of an audience, but, equally, of its collaborative character. Long before a play is "read" by an audience, it is subject to the interpretations of director, designers, and performers. For a playwright, this dependence on others will always be what is most fruitful and most problematic about the form. The more of it I do, the more complex this activity of writing for theatre seems, and the more I see my role as instrumental rather than definitive. Hypertext offers me a compelling model of an instrumental text, one that fuels collaborative exchange rather than predetermines it. Inspired by the digital form, I now seek to make my script a point of departure, not a complete and self-sufficient artefact to be translated, but an occasion of co-creation. I seek to make it a in fact, for my fellow artists no less than our audience.
Reimagining a script as hypertext means seeing it as a catalyst rather than a blueprint. It means rethinking the playwright's role in the production process, and the status of the text she produces. If it also means renouncing much of the author's traditional authority, the gain is a greatly range of creative interaction for all the artists concerned. And this inevitably means a richer work of art. The idea is literally transformative. As an open structure, the theatrical hypertext assumes new definitions of artistic responsibilities and, equally, new working relationships to enable them. It not only dissolves traditional territorial boundaries (between writer and designers, for example, word and space), but also the authority structures perpetuating them, and the formal ideologies they reproduce. The script as hypertext makes truly new theatre possible.
Proposing hypertext as a playwriting model inevitably raises the question of interactivity. How does the writer for theatre reproduce the experience of navigating an electronic text? What are the performance equivalents of clicking on links and jumping non-sequentially between them? There are various forms of "interactive" theatre that predate hypertext: plays with multiple endings on which audience members literally vote; promenade productions staged to allow multiple actions to be viewed simultaneously; improvisational performances incorporating audience suggestions and, sometimes, participation. And digital technology is now being used to take these rudimentary forms much further, as well as to create entirely new interactive, networked performance spaces.