Othello has long been a play that has provoked audience interjections. This chapter gives an account of a production staged by The Pantaloons theatre company in 2019 that was put together in order to explore the effects of direct audience address, playfulness and spontaneity. Player/playgoer relationships can be anticipated in the text, but they cannot be pre-programmed: they are determined by the moment-by-moment unfolding of the drama as it is played between actors and audience under specific, never-to-be-repeated conditions. Practice-as-research of this kind allows for a close-up examination of particular instances of actor/audience contact, and emphasises the creative role of the actor (and indeed the audience) in bringing ‘the play’ into its always-transient existence. Making detailed reference to the production’s rehearsal process, its development over the tour, the perspectives of its cast, and the responses of its audiences, this chapter argues that seeking opportunities for direct audience contact in Othello allows for a range of affective and ethical relationships between player and audience, some of which can have a substantial impact on the ways in which the play makes its meanings. It concludes with some thoughts about the possibilities inherent in conceptualising performance as play rather than as ‘acting’.

The introduction to Playing and Playgoing: Actor, Audience and Performance in Early Modern England argues that the study of theatrical culture is crucial to the scholarly investigation of dramatic texts: not merely of historical interest, but necessary for a full understanding of the plays themselves. Playing and Playgoing works with and reflects on approaches drawn from literary scholarship, theatre history, and performance studies, in seeking to advance the critical conversation on the interactions between: play-texts; performance spaces; the bodily, sensory and material experiences of the playhouse; and playgoers’ responses to, and engagements with, the theatre. This introduction explores three textual and archival examples that suggest the significance of the player-playgoer relationship at the heart of this book – and in so doing, it sets up the questions raised by this volume, and the shared interests that operate across the range of approaches these chapters offer.

In this autoethnographic essay, the author – a drummer – describes how he derives meaning from playing the drum kit. He presents accounts of playing drums both alone and in the context of an original rock band. Drawing from existing scholarship on aesthetic experience and meaning in music making, the author argues that while he plays drums often in a state of flow, it may be unhelpful to construe this – as others have done – as music making for its own sake. Rather than positioning his drumming as autotelic or intrinsically worthwhile, the author explains how he plays for the fulfilment derived therefrom, as part of a life lived in search of eudaimonia – flourishing both individually and as part of a community. Drumming in these contexts is, the author argues, a locus of spirituality, understood through the lenses of embodiment, authenticity, and personal agency as a form of success. Playing drums – for this drummer – provides a connection to, and a window into, his soul.