By Chris Lee

Such Tweet Sorrow is a modern-day take on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which started running on 12 April 2010 for five weeks on Twitter. It is the first professionally produced drama production on Twitter from the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), via a collaboration with Mudlark, a Birmingham-based cross-platform production company, jointly funded by 4iP (Channel 4) and Screen West Midlands, a lead regional agency for film, TV and digital media.

Although the production features characters developed from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Such Tweet Sorrow updates the original story and characterisations to create a new play in a new form that allows the audience to follow the action, romance and tragedy and interact with the main characters via their individual Twitter accounts, according to Jason Hall, Head of Innovation, New Markets and Skills at Screen West Midlands.

NMK’s Chris Lee caught up with Hall to analyse not only the impact of theatre on Twitter, but also the potential commercial opportunities it presents.

What was the inspiration for the project?

The project was inspired by the original Shakespeare play, but each partner involved has different motivations. From our perspective, what excited us was the opportunity to support the innovation of local creative and media businesses, and crucially, to find out how Twitter works as a content platform. There have been a number of experiments with this – and lots of forms of content appearing on Twitter – but can it do drama on this kind of scale and to the RSC standards of professionalism? We are interested in seeing whether or not this opens up new opportunities for other content creators – what lessons can they learn from Such Tweet Sorrow and, given the success of this project, does content on Twitter open up new revenue opportunities?

Does it really add any value to Shakespeare’s work?

From following the responses to the project on the #suchtweet hashtag, there are numerous examples of followers stating that they want to read/re-read or watch the play (or filmed productions) and teachers stating that they are using Such Tweet Sorrow in the classroom to engage students with the story and characters of Romeo and Juliet. Personally, I have found that beyond helping understanding of the stories and themes of the original play, Such Tweet Sorrow has really helped to flesh out the characters and understand the motivations behind their actions – and this is broadly consistent with the Shakespeare original and offers a new level of understanding behind it. We have seen the characters develop and engaged with them over a period of weeks rather than from behind a fourth wall and in a matter of hours, so this much, I suppose, is inevitable.

It’s also important to understand that this is not a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, although clearly – with RSC’s involvement especially – there are strong connections. This is a new work in its own right and is testing the boundaries of a new platform. One of the key questions for me was how do audiences respond differently to characters in a Twitter drama? Is there a stronger emotional connection to someone who is an ever-present in your Twitter stream – someone you interact and engage with on a one-to-one level – than exists in other dramatic forms? And what happens when that character dies and disappears from your Twitter stream? This was answered with the recent death of Mercuteio. He was one of the most popular characters and the actor playing the role interacted and engaged with his audience probably more than any others – to the point that a splinter group of #mercuteiogroupies emerged and launched a campaign to try and save him from his inevitable death.

What has take-up been like?

This begs an interesting question of how do you monitor take-up and audience figures for a drama over Twitter – which in itself is another part of the reason for the experiment; it throws up these kinds of questions that need to be answered. Different people will follow the play in different ways – some are following each individual cast member (officially seven in total, with between 3,500 – 6,000 followers each), some follow lists, both official and user-created (Juliet for example is listed 856 times), and others follow the story on the Such Tweet website. Under our own original success criteria, we had modest targets of attracting at least 1,000 followers for the project, which they have obviously surpassed massively.
Feedback has been phenomenal with a very vocal and active community quickly springing up around the project and numerous blogs written about it, both from an audience/entertainment perspective but also as a piece of theatre and from the digital media/use of Twitter angle. On the whole feedback is very positive, with lots of good, high quality debate and discussion. There has also been a huge amount of media interest, nationally and internationally from the Guardian to the New York Times.

What commercial opportunities did Such Tweet Sorrow create?

As a brand new venture, the commercial opportunities were relatively small for this project. Such Tweet Sorrow was sponsored by Sony Ericsson and the mobile phone network 3, which, in itself, prompted some debate and discussion about the rights and wrongs of product placement in a Twitter-based drama. From our perspective, we are tasked with investing in creative businesses and projects that are capable of generating revenue and so will always test for commercial viability. Interestingly, sponsorship was identified as pretty much the sole – or at least most likely – source of revenue for Such Tweet Sorrow, but through monitoring how the project has been received by its audience, other potential monetisation routes have emerged that could be explored in future Twitter productions. Again, this is part of our investment rationale – it’s not just about exploiting commercial opportunities in this specific project, but finding out through the course of the production whether or not there is longer-term potential for new business models to emerge on this platform.

What opportunities do you see for Twitter going forward?

I believe there is an awful lot of as-yet-untapped potential in Twitter as a content platform and we have, so far, only seen the tip of the iceberg. Clearly it is already well-established as a platform for news and celebrities; it is a wonderful platform for comedy – with the likes of Peter Serafinowicz, for example, really mastering the art of 140-character stand-up. We have seen the emergence of fictional characters tweeting individually, usually connected (often unofficially) with TV or Film franchises – @darthvader and characters from Mad Men, for instance. But what if those Mad Men characters were tweeting according to an established framework which offers a greater level of tie-in and understanding with characters and back-story in the official TV show – perhaps even spoilers or glimpses of what’s to come – rather than being fan fiction?

There is significant potential here, but it would involve drama production companies embracing this platform and the opportunities it presents from the outset and working it in as an integral part of the drama. This is probably some way off, given that TV production companies are only now starting to figure a way to make webisodes and YouTube work, which has been around for an awful lot longer and is lot more obviously in tune with their own milieu. There are also costs attached to producing the content on this kind of professional level, so the question is who will step in and fund it when it is still an unknown quantity and additional commercial potential and return on investment is as yet unclear? Production companies almost certainly won’t. Broadcasters might – but not yet. But whoever moves first and takes the risk may find they are in a strong position to capitalise on what could be a significant new platform – and revenue stream. 

So what have we learned?

A few themes have really emerged over the course of this project: When it’s done right, Twitter-based drama can be incredibly addictive, with strong soap-opera type qualities; There is a strong emotional attachment to characters in Twitter drama – you engage and interact with them as ‘friends’ - which can greatly heighten the drama; It breeds fans rather than merely followers – which can mean more as-yet-unexplored revenue opportunities; It changes Twitter habits – from users signing up or using Twitter for the first time to changing Twitter clients, using lists, using the media more frequently and fully.

This latter point is perhaps the most interesting one as it reinforces my own feeling that if Twitter is to become truly mainstream and start to get a much broader demographic and user base then it needs good content to do this – just as Facebook did before it, or indeed radio. Any new media platform starts its life as a tool for connecting people and communication, but it evolves, reaches maturity and attracts mass audiences when its potential for delivering creative content is fully explored.