MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In an episode from the latest season of Game of Thrones, one young character, Arya Stark, watches a performance by a traveling theatre troupe. They are telling the story of the recent intrigue and tragedy of the royal court, including the beheading of Arya’s father, which is played for laughs. Arya laughs where the rest of the audience weeps, and often weeps when they laugh, as she was a first-hand witness of many of the events now recreated before her. While the troupe performs for the purpose of entertaining the audience, the incident serves multiple purposes within the larger story, including passing along crucial information to Arya, and re-situating the television audience in relation to the “public” audience within the show. While these frames within frames are not uncommon, an exploration of these kinds of historicized “plays within” is useful in considering questions about narrative, about audience reception of live versus recorded performance, and about the popular contemporary view of early-modern and pre-modern performance.

Drawing on theories of staging practices of ancient, medieval, and Elizabethan theatre, this paper considers the use of such theatrical devices in mediatized performance. In exploring this phenomena through examples like the moment detailed above from Game of Thrones, as well as the performance of a court interlude in an episode of The Tudors, and excerpts of Shakespeare performed throughout the TV show Slings and Arrows, we can ask questions about the layers of frames within these moments, the use of conventions of live performance within a mediatized context (e.g. what does a missed cue “on stage” within an episode signal to the viewer), and the reception of the performance by both the audience within the episode and the TV audience - as well as the relationship and exchange between the two.