Is live theatre about to have its Netflix moment?
Live theatre is notoriously difficult to scale. To reach more audiences, a successful show must find a venue in a new location (often on a different continent), hire an entirely new cast and crew (mostly from the local industry due to union and working visa rules), teach that new team the show and then market the production according to local theatre-going trends. It requires enormous up-front capital investment, and is highly risky. This is why theatre is often backed by angel investors who are more interested in feeding their passion than their bank accounts.
But, all that could be about to change. Historically, theatre has struggled to find a technology suited to its mass distribution. The closest we have come has been NTLive, the high-budget, multi-camera broadcast of live productions, originally from the National Theatre in London and soon after from the biggest hits in the West End and on Broadway, to cinemas around the globe. This has been a huge success and, contrary to the fears that dogged its initial launch, has actually driven more people to the theatre itself. It turns out that theatre doesn’t have an already saturated audience, it just has an accessibility problem. However, those high budgets exclude most productions from taking part. And, as a medium, it’s purposefully designed to be second best to the real thing (that’s an opinion, not a fact 😉).
The reason I used the Netflix comparison in the title for this blog is because I believe the streaming company fundamentally changed the way that a lot of TV is made (article from 2015), i.e., for binge watching. On demand viewing is now the primary intended output of a lot of television. Or, at least, a lot of television is now created for that medium.
So, what tech can theatre-makers utilise to reach wider audiences? After two years of lockdowns causing cancellations and closures, has innovation risen to meet the demand for live performance in a mass-market format that is designed as a primary output? Or are we just relieved to be able to go back to IRL venues, and crossing our fingers, toes and broken legs that we’ll never return to the dark ages of 2020/21?
“Theatre is an incredibly labour-intensive business. In many ways, putting on a show now is almost a labour of love. Very few shows hit the jackpot in the way a Hamilton, Lion King or Phantom Of The Opera do… we are at the point of no return, really… There comes a point now when we really can’t go on much more” — Andrew Lloyd Webber, September 2020.
Well, I would argue that, yes: incredible innovation has been demonstrated over the last two years, and it’s evolving into a format of theatre entirely of its own right, which means it won’t replace (or compete with) traditional theatre-going. It will likely thrive alongside traditional theatre, as NTLive has proven is possible. So, let’s take a look at what’s been created and what trends and recent developments suggest might be the future.
Some of the first companies to go online (in the UK, at least) were Swamp Motel and Creation Theatre. The former has built a reputation for disruptive immersive theatrical productions that push the boundaries of audience engagement and bring the world of the show to the lives of their audience. And the latter has been producing beautiful site-specific and innovative productions of (often) Shakespeare’s work in landmark locations in and around Oxford. Both companies experimented with video conferencing and gaming technologies and generated headlines (and impressive ticket sales) while their peers were in hibernation mode. They proved that theatre can exist outside of the auditorium, and that audiences could be just as engaged with productions delivered via a screen as a stage. Especially when the production involves multiple layers of engagement, across different platforms, such as Swamp Motel’s ‘Isklander’ series that unravelled across various websites containing hidden clues; and even enter the real world, such as Creation’s collaboration with Hawksmoor steakhouse for their Christmas Carol production including a home-delivered meal to extend the world of the show beyond the obvious senses of sight and sound and into the more visceral and under-explored senses of touch, taste and smell.
Pushing the boundaries even further on technical innovation, very early on in the pandemic, LA-based game developers Tender Claws launched ‘The Under Presents: Tempest’, a multiplayer virtual reality immersive theatre experience based on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, with live actors. The idea that a live performance could happen inside a multiplayer video game generated a lot of attention. However, Virtual Reality does have its drawbacks. Having worked on VR projects with the cultural sector in the past, the real reality is that it is not a mainstream format. The headsets have not been, and in my opinion, will never be popular enough to call VR a viable means of mass distribution.
So, let’s look at AR, which in my opinion, is the most promising technology (disclaimer: I’m biased). Augmented Reality has the benefit of being extremely accessible. It’s available on almost all mobile phones and is ubiquitous across social media, mostly in the form of filters for photos and videos. But what actually is it? Well, AR places a digital layer on top of the real world as seen through the lens of a digital camera, such as those on smartphones, using computer vision to lock the virtual image to a physical place so that it appears to augment the immediate space it is seen in. Popular examples include ‘Pokemon Go’.
Aside from being more ubiquitous than VR headsets, AR also has the benefit of being rooted in the real world. This means that theatre-makers can more easily bring the experience off the screen (or out of the app) and into the audience’s wider physical or digital environment, in their homes, neighbourhoods or across social media and the web, with hybrid immersive productions.
Current developments in gaming and virtual worlds (fine, the Metaverse) mean that real-time virtual interactivity in spatial environments are becoming bigger, more exciting and more popular. But it’s primarily being driven by commerce. I’d argue that without genuinely brilliant, engaging, moving entertainment, the Metaverse will fail. And there’s a lot of money banking on that not happening. I can only think of one industry that’s suited to take centre stage in this gold rush… theatre.
So, how does this affect the scalability of traditional theatre? Well, if you can extend your live performance IP across the globe virtually before expanding physically to new markets, you can de-risk the entire project by increasing global awareness from home and establishing where the demand is before you go knocking on those angel investors’ doors. Alternatively, regional theatre can localise their physical work while still creating (and generating revenue from) international work.
“It also gives you a format where you can be ambitious, grow audiences, have an international profile and keep your physical work very local. Lockdown gave us a model where we can do both things — be local and be international at the same time. If we can make more work regionally and people can live around the country, it’s a big improvement in quality of life for a lot of people.” — Lucy Askew, Creation Theatre.
Live, interactive and immersive performance is about to go global. Smart theatre-makers should be warming up now, because the spotlight is about to shine on them.
P.S. — Creation Theatre published a very interesting booklet about their experience creating ‘Alice in Wonderland: A Virtual Theme Park’, in order to share their learnings and support others to explore the potential of digital performance, which can be found here.
