Transforming
Theatre
Digitally
C&T’s Prospero is a powerful, practitioner-led digital platform that offers theatre makers a flexible, scalable, and highly accessible tool to extend participation, engagement, and creativity across all aspects of theatre practice. Developed directly out of applied theatre, Prospero acts as a virtual facilitator — enabling artists to deliver workshops, devise productions, rehearse, train, tour, and engage audiences in new and innovative ways.
At its core, Prospero allows theatre makers to create Smartscripts — dynamic, branching digital scripts that combine text, video, audio, imagery, quizzes, polls, and live inputs. These interactive frameworks are not static digital presentations, but adaptable, responsive systems that can be shaped around the needs of participants, audiences, or creative collaborators. Smartscripts allow theatre makers to build learning journeys, narrative structures, rehearsal pathways or audience experiences that adjust based on user choice, participation or input. This supports theatre makers in blending live performance with digital interactivity, inviting users into the creative process as active participants rather than passive spectators.
In participatory theatre contexts — whether applied theatre, youth theatre, community performance or drama education — Prospero offers an unmatched level of virtual facilitation. Theatre makers can guide participants remotely, structure workshops, assign tasks, deliver exercises, collect responses and develop co-created content. The platform’s ability to combine live and asynchronous participation means that creative processes can continue across multiple sessions, locations, or groups, vastly expanding the reach of participatory practice.
For touring companies, Prospero offers huge potential to create digitally distributable touring experiences. Smartscripts can accompany live productions, offering digital wraparound workshops, interactive audience guides, or pre- and post-show engagement tools that enrich the audience journey. Entire education and outreach programmes can be embedded within Prospero, allowing theatre companies to extend the life and impact of their touring work without the costs of continuous physical presence. A school hundreds of miles from a tour venue can still experience high-quality engagement work delivered digitally via Prospero.
Prospero does a brilliant job at combining technology with collaborative learning in drama.
Music and Drama Education Awards
The platform’s ease of use is central to its power. Theatre makers do not require coding knowledge or complex technical skills to design highly interactive experiences. Its intuitive drag-and-drop authoring interface enables practitioners to focus on content and creativity, while Prospero manages the underlying digital infrastructure. New modules, workshops or experiences can be created rapidly and updated as projects evolve.
Importantly for theatre organisations with limited budgets, Prospero is designed to be affordable and scalable. Unlike bespoke app development or major digital infrastructure investments, Prospero operates as a subscription platform with no expensive upfront development costs. Whether a small-scale artist-run project or a large-scale national theatre company, organisations can scale their use of the platform to match their needs and resources.
In terms of audience engagement, Prospero opens new creative frontiers. Audiences can interact with content via their own devices — mobile phones, tablets, laptops — in theatres, at home, or on the move. Gamified experiences, choose-your-own-adventure narratives, interactive companion content, and digital archive access can all be created within Prospero’s framework, extending the creative envelope of theatre practice into hybrid, cross-platform storytelling.
At its heart, Prospero is not simply a digital delivery system, but a virtual co-creator that supports the entire lifecycle of theatre making — from devising, research and development, through to rehearsal, performance, audience engagement, education and legacy. It enables theatre makers to harness the opportunities of digital participation while staying true to the live, human, and co-creative values at the heart of theatre.
In an era where theatre makers increasingly seek to blend live and digital practice, widen access, and create sustainable, scalable ways of working, Prospero offers an artist-designed, practice-led solution that unlocks new possibilities for creation, connection, and participation.