EITHERne cool spring afternoon, the Wasteland Theater Company gathered to rehearse Romeo and Juliet. Jonathan “Bram” Thomas was playing Romeo. An avowed fan of Shakespeare, he graduated with a degree in drama, and this wasn’t the first time he’d played one half of the star-crossed lovers. But it was the first time a mutant scorpion the size of a Jeep had been on his stage.
In a panic, the show’s crew rained bullets down on its blackened shell, but not before Juliet fell under its sting. A poisoned death, certainly, but not one the Bard ever dreamed of writing.
“It’s just one of those things,” Bram shrugs, with the nonchalant nonchalance of an actor now used to this kind of setback. You come to expect them when you’re acting inside a video game.
Wasteland Theater Company is not your typical acting band. Scattered around the world, they gather behind their keyboards to perform within Fallout 76, a video game set in a post-nuclear apocalyptic America. The Fallout series is one of the most popular of the games, famous for encouraging players to play the survivors within the strangely beautiful ruins of alternate history Earth. As you explore the crumbling rubble of cities hollowed out by an atomic bomb, tumbleweeds scrape across scorched sand, rusting Nuka-Cola signs rustle in the breeze, and you’re constantly on the lookout for irradiated things that want to maim you.
Fallout 76 is an open world online; players travel wherever they want and may meet real-life strangers. With “area chat” enabled, they can even talk to each other through microphones, calling out to a passerby on the dusty road. This opens up endless opportunities for user-generated chance, and Wasteland Theater Company is one of those experiences: something deliciously unexpected for players to encounter with devastation.
“Imagine a wandering theater company in the 17th century going from town to town doing small performances,” says the company’s director, Northern_Harvest, who uses his gamertag or simply ‘North’ and works in communications in real life. “It is not a new idea; we’re just doing it within the new medium of a video game.”
The company was formed almost by chance, when North befriended a group of players in the Wasteland. While adventuring together, they noticed that the Fallout games are peppered with references to Shakespeare’s works. A yellowed sign in a school hallway announces auditions for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The characters yell “once more into the gap, dear friends!” before venturing from the safety of home. On a mission, you meet a survivor who tries to lure super mutants off their path of violence by bombarding them with recitations from Shakespeare.
“The Fallout universe lends itself very well to Shakespeare. It’s very desolate, very grotesque, very tragic, really,” North says. In this world, Shakespeare existed before the bombs fell, so it seemed only fitting that North and his friends could represent a company that kept culture alive in the ruins of civilization, like the troupe of actors in Emily’s post-apocalyptic dystopia. St John Mandel. Station Eleven.
It takes months to put together a show. First, North chooses the play and adapts it. Hundreds of pages of script are shared with the team, so set design and rehearsals can begin. “It’s like a real theater company, where you start with an idea and a few people sit down together and decide what our season will be like,” she says.
Between shows, the actors scour the Fallout wasteland for costume pieces. “We have this workbench where you can build your team,” says North. “So, during rehearsals, you’ll often hear offstage the ‘Kaching! Caching! Kaching! of a hammer while an actor quickly puts together the garment they forgot that day”. And having learned of the scorpion incident, North now hires guards to protect the production. “I tell the cast, ‘please don’t take out your mini-weapons on stage. We have security in place to take care of that.’” Occasionally someone threatens to blow up the stage with a rocket launcher mid-performance, but more often than not they end up seeing half of Midsummer. (Think what that means for the Mechanics of the Play subplot: The audience sat in front of a computer screen, watching the cast be players, play players, play players, in a play.)
There are no ticketed seats and the company makes no money. Most audiences accidentally stumble upon the performances on the wasteland and sit down to watch the show for free or tune in to Twitch, where the company streams each performance live. Characters walk through stages that cantilever together from in-game objects. Illuminated cues provide ambiance. The soliloquies are delivered passionately. “Before the show, you’re nervous,” North says. “You have the nervousness like you would in the real theater. The emotions are very real, which makes it all very real.”
in 2022 Fallout 76 claimed to have over 13.5 million players, some of whom North believes “maybe they have never seen a Shakespearean play. Ninety-nine percent of those who find us sit and watch the show in silence… It’s really very moving, performing for people who may not go to the theater in their own communities or who may not have thought of Shakespeare since childhood. high school. We are delighted to learn that we are potentially reaching untapped new audiences and (re)introducing Shakespeare to so many. I hope Shakespearean scholars who study comparative drama will take note of our use of this new medium to reach new audiences. I know some high school English teachers have used us as an example to their students of how Shakespeare can and should be performed in new spaces.”
North is emphatic that his company’s plays are never meant to replace the magic of real-world productions. Instead, they are what Bram calls “a gateway drug” to stage storytelling; a player can search for a play at The Globe or support his local theater after enjoying Macbeth on the moor. His performances in his video games could be a way to boost support for a creative industry that has been decimated by a pandemic and now a cost-of-living crisis.
“What we’re doing is really new and expands the potential of using video games as digital performance spaces… It reminds us that Shakespeare is constantly finding new places to be played and loved. There are Shakespeare companies that help people in the criminal justice system explore the arts, Shakespeare audio podcasts, and we’re here bringing Shakespeare into the vast world of games.”
North says the whole experience of putting on these shows has been life-changing for her. He now spends most nights in Fallout and is working on the company’s next play, this time a performance of Alice in Wonderland. “There’s always an article every year that asks, ‘Do video games make people more violent?’” he says. “I think we are a perfect example of how video games inspire creativity and celebrate theatre, culture and the arts. I hope other gamers know that there is a lot of potential for you to express what you are passionate about in video games.”