The actors, their characters, and the audience
Leaving aside the creation of Sweet Fanny Adams in Hyperspace Eden, there is a second important point about the structure of the piece. This was very pertinent in the case of the Pitlochry performance. Sweet Fanny Adams in Eden requires of the actor a whole new type of text based performance, a subtly different type of acting that not all can master. The Pitlochry performance literally redefined what it meant to develop a character. On successive nights, the actors rediscovered what the website had demonstrated all along that their words could be delivered in any order. Towards the end of the run (when usually the actors might be settling into a tiresome repetition, with one eye on their next audition) the Pitlochry cast were inventing entirely new scenes, and thus finding new meanings in the play, new insights into their characters. Crucially, this was not improvisation, because what could and could not be said had been clearly defined by the writer some months before, and rehearsed during the previous fortnight. Instead, they evolved scenes that revealed secrets about the world of Sweet Fanny Adams that even the writer had not consciously understood. The four-week run allowed the kind of character development that is not possible in media other than theatre, and rarely explored in conventional (linear) theatre. It was the unique construction of the script online that gave the actors the confidence and inspiration to play, create, and innovate in this way.
While Sweet Fanny Adams in Eden is conventionally entertaining, with a set of strong characters, and Fairy Tale themes given a defiant twist, it is nevertheless the method of its creation that sets it apart. This piece simply could not have been created before the advent of HTML language, and not practically before the introduction of web authoring tools (such as Adobe GoLive). It is one of the few examples of Internet technology being used as a medium for creation in itself, rather than as a substitute for the page or the TV screen. It is thus quintessentially of its time. Furthermore, it has inspired new techniques for actors, and presented an entirely new form of performance art to the audiences of Scotland. Back in cyber-space, it will bring this new art to the rest of the world.