Time was that theatre would be all about text and the acting of that text; but I realise that those days are long, long gone, and its irredeemably old-fashioned to even point it out. Theatre is now a multi-media melting pot of ideas, techniques and stylistic choices being pressed into the service of telling its stories.
This week I have spent four successive nights in the theatre where film and video technology have played a greater or lesser role in realising those stories - or virtually becoming the story itself. At the National Theatre, Katie Mitchell - who made her name as a director who minutely mined the texts of plays by Ibsen and Chekhov, in particular, to release their naturalistic rhythms - has been obsessively pursuing a new strand of working, first with a deconstruction of Virginia Woolf’s Waves, then with Martin Crimp’s experimental Attempts on Her Life and now and with …Some Trace of Her, where live action is created onstage only in order to be simultaneously filmed and projected on a large screen above the stage.
The film is the ultimate destination, but our role in the theatre is watch the journey of how it makes its way there - and though it’s fascinating to watch the incredible discipline of the cast as they meticulously create each scene (and sound effect) in front of us, there are diminishing returns theatrically speaking in trying to keep an eye on them and not the screen.
As Quentin Letts remarked in his Daily Mail review yesterday, “From my seat in row D of the stalls I missed much of what little acting there was because the view was obstructed by clobber and gubbins and actors doubling up as stage-hands. They kept knocking stuff over, too.” The online version of this review wittily offers a précis verdict: “Oi! You’re standing in the way”. In my own review for yesterday’s London Paper, I called it a kind of live art-house cinema; and while it’s fun, for a while, to try to spot where and how each bit of the movie is being created, the effect turns the evening into a technical exercise that, unlike Mitchell’s other work that draws you into its world, is about distancing you from it. During the set up for one scene, I spotted Hattie Morahan furiously gesturing about something that was missing; somebody handed her some earrings just in time before the camera alighted on her fiddling with them, but with the artifice behind creating every scene underlined, there was nowhere left to make a dramatic connection with what was unfolding in them.
On the other hand, video and theatre can be harnessed to support each other in perfect harmony. The stage version of Brief Encounter, of course, already owes its origins to a celebrated movie; and is currently being played out in an actual sometime cinema in the Haymarket that turns it into a kind of site-specific work. No wonder the posters and front-of-house displays outside the venue stress, “Live on Stage - Not the Film”. I saw it again the other day, and was delighted afresh by the fusing that Emma Rice does of stage and screen, with the action stepping both beyond and (literally at a couple of points) into a movie - it’s like Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo turned into 3D.
Another director clearly fascinated by the theatrical possibilities of film is Rupert Goold, and (very freely) playing around with Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre, he may leave the audience in search of the original play, but gives his own dazzling imaginative spin on it that doesn’t, however, sacrifice it all to live video but makes it an integral part of the story itself. He and his co-adaptor Ben Power swap the stage rehearsal of the original to re-set it amongst a group of contemporary documentary film makers and therefore fully justify the live interactions between screen and stage that allow for an eventually dizzying series of layers between reality and illusion to be liberally inserted. There’s even a terrific juxtaposition when an actor from Six Characters is seen on film stumbling into the finale of The Music Man playing next door.
It’s an occasion full of self-referential theatrical pleasures: I loved the sequence when the production itself is pitched to an executive producer at Chichester, and they discuss casting possibilities. Patrick Stewart went down well there last year; perhaps they could get him?, asks the producer. No, he’s in Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon with David Tennant, replies the director. Ah, I must get tickets, answers the producer and asks, Is it being directed by Kenneth Branagh? No, that’s the one with Jude Law, says the director. At the National?, the producer asks. No, that’s the one with Rory Kinnear, the director replies. Roy Kinnear?, asks the producer. No, his son, Rory!
Perhaps only readers of this blog would actually get all the references, but they’re well-placed and witty. On the other hand, the child-like drawings that provide the rolling - and over-literal - animation that makes up for the absence of much of a set in the Festival Hall’s The Wizard of Oz are neither. No doubt it was a stylistic choice, too, but that kind of video intervention undermines rather than supports the charm of the live performances onstage.
It isn't really that new. Six years ago I was in a youth theatre play that was filmed and projected on a big screen as we were performing on stage in the theatre. And four years ago, for a separate company, we had two wide tv like screens at a high level on two sides of a traverse stage (not the same sides as where the audience were sitting) portraying various imagines to evoke the setting - leaves for a forest etc.
However in either case we never let down the pretence. In the former example, the camera was always there, but it couldn't disturb the performance. We were always "on". In the latter case it was subtly used to evoke setting, and wasn't overpowering.
So... the use of film techniques, video/screen work - it's been there for quite a while. But it should never detract from the performance, or indeed distract the performers through its presence.