Paradocumentation and NT Live’s ‘CumberHamlet’

Live broadcasts of theatrical events result in complex documentation processes for performance at the points of production, consumption, interpretation and further production. The increasing popularity of live broadcasts offers brand new possibilities for documenting performance, not only for theatres but for audiences. Acknowledging the temporal, spatial and conceptual distances between the theatre production of a particular play and discrete audiences enabled via the NT Live streaming, this chapter focuses in particular on the concept of paradocumentation, asserting a notion of unity between performances and their documents, borne in part from the technology of NT Live. An analysis of a production and livecast of Hamlet in 2015 identifies key features of the Barbican Centre and NT Live production with particular attention to the merging of performance and its documents. The latter part of the chapter expands upon the notion of paradocumentation, with an exploration of data gleaned from an audience survey, and analyzes and suggests patterns of evidence for audience-created paradocumentation.