How do you block a scene for an audience that isn't actually in the room?
Every instinct a stage actor has is built on proximity: where the light falls, how far a whisper carries, the split second a director waits for a laugh to land before moving on. None of that maps cleanly onto a screen. A camera doesn't laugh back, and a living room isn't a theatre, no matter how good the lighting is.
For a long stretch, that mismatch didn't matter much, because it wasn't anyone's problem to solve. Then the rooms closed, and theatre professionals who had spent careers reading a live crowd found themselves reading nothing at all. Most tried to adapt the only way they could think to: point a camera at the stage and hope the recording held some of what the room used to give for free. It rarely did.
More Than a Livestream
The mistake was an understandable one. Filming a play looks, at a glance, like the digital version of a play. It isn't. A livestream keeps the theatrical form and drops the theatrical craft, the pacing, the framing, the sense of where an eye should land, because none of those things were ever designed for a rectangle on a laptop.
Getting this right meant going back to first principles instead of patching the old process. Before writing a single training module, the team behind a new curriculum for theatre professionals sat down with working actors, directors, and technicians across Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, and Spain and simply asked what going digital had actually required of them, rather than assuming the answer in advance.
Three Acts
What came out of those conversations settled into a shape any theatre person would recognise instantly: three acts, not unlike a play itself. Creating covers the part most people picture first — camera framing, digital blocking, choosing which tools actually suit a scene rather than whichever software happened to be free. Producing is the less visible half: managing a digital rehearsal process, coordinating a cast that might be in three different homes, keeping a production on schedule without a shared physical room to anchor it.
The third act, promoting, is the one traditional theatre training usually skips entirely. A digital performance doesn't fill seats the way a poster outside a venue does; it needs an audience built deliberately, often from nothing, across platforms most theatre training never touches. Treating that as a real skill, worth teaching properly, is arguably the curriculum's most useful departure from how theatre has traditionally been taught.
Aristi Spyrou, an actor and theatrical teacher based in Cyprus, felt that shift firsthand while the project's team was still gathering research.
"The main difference in a digital play is the camera," she said.
Where a live audience takes in an entire stage at once, a lens decides what gets seen: a face, a pair of hands, a whole body, handing the director a kind of control theatre never quite had before. Spyrou was careful to add that the acting itself can't shrink to match the frame: whatever the camera chooses to show, the performance underneath still has to stay full-sized. It's a small distinction, but it's close to the entire curriculum in one line: the old instincts aren't wrong, they just need a new target.
Tested, Not Just Written
None of this stayed theoretical. The approach was piloted on real productions, run through creation, production, and performance under the same three-act structure, before any of it was written up as guidance for anyone else. What didn't hold up under actual rehearsal conditions got cut; what worked got kept.
That order matters. A guide built purely from theory tends to sound right and fall apart the first time someone tries to use it under real deadline pressure. Testing it against actual productions first meant the final version had already survived contact with a real rehearsal room, cameras and all.
The project behind all of this, Digital Theatre, co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ programme, is running across the UK, Greece, Cyprus, Spain, and Portugal, built specifically to hand this three-act structure to professionals who never asked to become digital directors overnight, and to the community groups and amateur companies who had even fewer resources to work it out alone.
The room didn't disappear so much as change shape. The craft just needed someone to say so out loud.
If you've had to reblock your own work for a screen, get in touch, we'd like to hear what you had to unlearn.