ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on audiences and reception as a way of determining when and for whom the live relay is an adaptation. It considers the thriving practice of screening live theatre performances in cinemas with a two-fold purpose. With the development of both digital technologies and cinema screenings of live performance, the performative scope of companies such as National Theatre of Great Britain (NT) and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) has expanded to reach not just national audiences but international ones. Barker in his conclusion to Live to Your Local Cinema: The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting points to a variety of lacunae when it comes to writing about and on the live relay of performances, one of these omissions being the link between adaptation studies and livecasts. The transferral of the content material from the theatrical medium to the cinematic medium is a straightforward transmedial shift in form.
