The whole point about theatre is that it’s live. Flesh-and-blood actors are up
there on the stage. That’s why you spend big money on tickets and travel. To
see the real thing. Everything else is merely moving pictures. But few
people see theatre live. Okay, 50m or more have seen Les Misérables. Most
shows, though, are lucky to get tens of thousands; some get hundreds. Then
they are just memories. This is odd in the age of infinite copies. Now
everything can be digitally reproduced, downloaded, uploaded, stored,
pirated, swapped. So why not — forgetting, for the moment, the
flesh-and-blood thing — theatre?
Well, it does happen. The National Theatre has been broadcasting live
performances to cinemas, an approach that originated with leading opera
houses such as New York’s Metropolitan Opera and London’s Royal Opera; the
latter also shows its wares on giant screens around the country. There are
theatre archives on DVD. But does it work? No. You don’t feel you own these
shows in the way you do when you see them live. Why not? Two reasons. First,
both cinema showings and big screens outside put you in the cheapest seats
in the house. The real audience is part of the show; you’re only an
onlooker. Second, the filming is flat. It doesn’t work to get you into the
show. What’s wrong, for example, with those brief theatre clips they show on
BBC2’s Newsnight Review? They’re filmed specially, but neither as
television, where the camera provides the focus, nor as theatre, where the
audience does.
“I’ve done productions where Newsnight Review took five minutes,” says Robert
Delamere, a theatre, opera and television director. “The actors didn’t have
an audience, nor were they focused on playing to the camera, so there was no
focus at all. It’s why those recorded sections are so hopeless.”
Delamere and Tom Shaw, a film, video and live events expert, have taken the
theatrical bull by the digital horns. Last night, at midnight, their
website, www.digitaltheatre.com, went live. It is a theatrical version of
iTunes.
This is how it works. You download a special player — like the BBC iPlayer —
and you can buy digitised versions of theatrical productions for £8.99 a go.
They are yours to keep, although you can’t pass them round: they are locked
on your player. The shows are in high def, so the downloads are big, about
4.5 gigabytes, and they take time. But you can start watching 15 minutes
into the process. Since midnight, three shows have been on offer — the
Almeida production of Parlour Song, by Jez Butterworth, the Young Vic’s
Kafka’s Monkey and English Touring Theatre’s version of Hardy’s Far
from the Madding Crowd, adapted by Mark Healy. There’s also a trailer for
the Young Vic’s The Container, by Clare Bayley. New plays will be added
continuously.
Delamere and Shaw pointedly don’t talk about filming performances, they talk
about “capturing” them. “Theatre has been filmed as
archive for a long time,” Shaw says. “There’s usually one camera, or three
cameras with a distant view. The result isn't particularly engaging and
doesn’t transmit what the performance was like. And there’s often
a problem with sound. What we recognised was an opportunity, now the
technology is around, to get closer to the performance, capturing it rather
than filming it.” And they don’t want it to look like television.
“In terms of where it sits on the scale between theatre and television,”
Shaw says, “we want it to be on the side of theatre.”
“One of our hopes,” Delamere says, “is to create a fantastic shop window for
the theatre. It’s expensive, especially for a weekend visit, or for somebody
coming in on a train. It’s accepted as a powerful art form in the UK and in
the media. The government goes on about it. But it’s unseen by so many
people, it’s very ghettoised.”
Each production is done differently. Far from the Madding Crowd is shot as a
multiscene epic, The Container as a taut chamber piece. Basically, though,
for all the shows, they use many cameras — the most so far is 13. They use
scheduled performances with audiences. Watching, you are aware of the crowd,
coughs and all. The cameras are now so small that nobody notices the filming
process. “We don’t want either the theatre or the audience to realise we’re
there on the night,” Delamere says. They are now experimenting with silent
tracking mechanisms to introduce camera movement. They can already zoom and
pan easily from remote controls. Each show is filmed twice — usually a
matinée and an evening performance — to make sure they get the right shot.
With 13 cameras shooting continuously, this means editing from 26 versions
of the play, a long process.
On the basis of what I’ve seen, the results are superb. When I visited Digital
Theatre’s Soho office, I was glumly expecting the usual deadness of the
filmed stage performance. What I got was something quite new. Thanks to the
editing and the multiple points of view, you feel inside the piece in a way
that compensates for the loss of that flesh-and-blood thing. Yet, although
it’s new, the idea is not to redirect, rather to “capture” the original
intent of the director. “We’re trying to follow their intentions,” Delamere
says. “We’ve had directors and writers inside the edit suite, trying to
repeat the intentions of the production itself.”
They had the idea about 18 months ago and have been working on the site for
the past year. Various investors have put in £1m, and the chairman of their
board is, consolingly perhaps, an accountant: Philip Wright, of
PricewaterhouseCoopers. Sales will be worldwide, and they are hoping for
downloads in the “tens of thousands”.
Will it work? Well, straws in the digital arts wind suggest it might. For a
start, others are onto the digitised-theatre idea. Greenwich Theatre, with
Stage on Screen, has launched productions of Doctor Faustus and The School
for Scandal on DVD, primarily for schools. The main issue here, as with
Digital Theatre, is access. Live performances are hard, expensive and
ephemeral. On the other hand, just reading a play is rather missing the
point.
Amazon, meanwhile, launched its Kindle book reader in the UK last week. That
may not be the right device, any more than the Sony Reader is, but Apple’s
upcoming “tablet” probably will be, so books are now about to be routinely
read as digital files. It is what people now expect, whether the product is
art or porn. In addition, art on television seems to be moving away from a
pre-digital model. Once, “the arts” — a grim phrase for a grim ghetto —
tended to be heavily mediated by television documentaries to bring them to
the masses, in a kind of Fabian spirit rooted in the post-war idealistic
conviction that “nothing is too good for the common man”. Now the common man
knows perfectly well that nothing is too good for him; and as for what is
good, he’ll be the judge of that. So, if you tune into Sky Arts, for
example, what you tend to get is the thing itself, unmediated. Testing this,
I got Indian classical music followed by Fritz Lang’s film M. The station is
also running the hot but demanding American television drama In Treatment.
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