Against Live Broadcasting Theatre Performances
I recently went to watch the Kenneth Branagh production of Shakespeare’s classic tragic fairy tale The Winter’s tale. The production was in the newly refurbish Garrick in London’s West End and I watched it sitting in a theatre in Lancaster 250 miles away.
There has been a steady increase of “live” showings of production in the recent years. Most notably, London’s National Theatre, now has partnerships with cinemas across the world and stream many of their opening nights in a program known as National Theatre Live. This isn’t specific to theatre productions either as ballets and operas are also getting the silver screen features.
I’m not a fan.
The arguments for are apparent. There is a definitive economic incentive; as now theatre companies can sell seats in more than one location for a singular production. No longer is the audience limited to the the number of seats available in a theatre. Showrunners can plan to sell tens of thousands of tickets instead of a couple hundred and there is no denying how that must increase their profit margin. ‘
Theatre work has always been a notoriously unsafe line of work, unless you are hired by a popular theatre building to manage its lighting, your employment and salary are planned over seasons of a play. This makes running a theatre company with regularly employed actors a risk. What if your next production is a bust? And it’s not just actors either, the general public tends to underestimate just how many people are involved in a single production. Costume, Props, Location, Casting, Lighting, Writers, Understudies, Musicians, Stage Managers, Make up… It is a lot of people. A new source of income will obviously be appreciated.
There is also the generational argument. The new generation want blockbusters with explosions and million dollar budgets, the theatre can’t provide this. Millennials, and to a certain extent, the generation before them, don’t want to spend two to three times more money for a theatre ticket over a cinema ticket. By allowing theatre plays to be played at cinemas, production companies can assume that a greater cross section of the population will be interested and grow fond of the beautiful medium. Now, I’m sure somewhere out there is a statistic that shows that more people go to the theatre nowadays than ever before, however, I’d challenge that to being down to the larger variety of theatre plays and the general increase in population, and that the percentage of people in the world that have been to theatre play is decreasing. Live streaming a theatre production to the cinema seems like the perfect solution, you increase your audience size and you remove the boundaries of price and comfort that going to a theatre house usually come with.
However, this isn’t theatre.
I own a DVD of a Cirque du Soleil performance, do I say that I’ve been to see that performance? No.
The experience of going to the theatre is very different to the experience of going to the cinema. There is no popcorn. There is no giant screen. The action does fill your entire field of view. There are, for most part, no bleacher style chairs. A cinema isn’t a social gathering in the same way a play can be. In the theatre you arrive early because you want to be there when the play starts. You wait in a foyer. You may buy a drink and chat in a room full of other people drinking and chatting. In the cinema you arrive fashionably late as to not have to sit through 25 minutes of adverts and trailers.
Nonetheless, my biggest criticism of recorded theatre is the camera. Theatre doesn’t have a camera, but cinema does, and to me, it is distancing. The most jarring moment of the whole experience was when the camera cut from a “normal” head on view of the stage, to a close up of an actor’s face. You cannot do that with your eyes in real life, and you shouldn’t allow a camera to do it for you.
Close up shots damage many aspects of the performance. Firstly, stage acting is very different from onscreen acting. Most of on screen acting is captured with a camera that frames the actors face so that it fills up majority of the screen, it is more subtle in that sense. Theatre acting generally is larger, the audience is watching you whole body the whole time. Even though different styles have their own acting conventions, one could generalise that body language is vastly more important on stage than on screen. Close up shots eliminate this.
Close up shots also ruining staging. You cannot use juxtaposition if the audience is limited to seeing only a quarter of the screen at a time. You cannot gather other characters responses to events from their body language if they are not in frame. Close up shots also eliminate the perception of depth. Images are flat and are projected flat; theatre on stage is in three dimensions. Excellent staging will use stage depth as a part of the storytelling medium. How could you show Hedda’s distancing from George in Hedda Gabler without the inner room being at the back of the stage?
Stage effects such as films and smoke and snow and lighting tricks are not captured properly by a camera. During The Winter’s Tale, a scene where the illusion of snow is produced through falling pieces of paper and smart lighting simply does not translate onto film. Other effects like using projections on stage have their effects diminished. A recording of Judi Dench delivers a monologue during the production and it is projected against a backdrop after the act break, which means, in the cinema, I was watching a recording of a recording. That isn’t right.
Character’s cannot break the fourth wall when in film. The wall is unbreakable. (I’m watching Deadpool tomorrow…) In the theatre, the fourth wall is imaginary and drawn at the proscenium; in the cinema, it is simply the screen. This was very apparent when the comedic Bard character from The Winter’s Tale begins to sing songs to the actual live audience. When he breaks the fourth wall, he looks at the audience, not at the lens of the camera. We never get the effect.
The chorus of characters that populate the king’s court enter from the audience aisles. That doesn’t translate into film. The only reason you could tell that they entered from the audience was by the directional microphones used, and such the sound of them entering came from behind. Otherwise, the framing would not have told us.
This brings up another point; sound. The audienced is mic’d so that we can hear their gasps and claps and laughs. However, I’d argue that this isn’t something desired. Theatre is an intimate experience unlike cinema. A film was made and will not change no matter how you react to it. A play is unfolding in front of you, actors feed off the energy of their public. The energy created is personal to that performance and will never be the same. By playing a live audience track into the theatres, that energy is forced upon us. It gives a similar effect as using a laugh track on a multi cam sitcom. You know when to laugh because other people laugh. It distances you from the performance even more, as you are never allowed to experience the performance on your own level or on the level of those around you, but are governed by an audience 250 miles away. And to say this has no effect on the performance is an insult to theatre as an art. Theatre is curated by and experienced by societies, an audience in London is a very different society to those watching a live streaming of the show in a completely different country.
The audience is the camera in a stage production and that is one of the undeniable truths of theatre.
A director can use many techniques to suggest where the audience should look at, but it is always ultimately the audience’s decision. When I see live performances I usually spend a lot of time watching the characters who aren’t speaking to see there reaction through the body language. One could also spend a long time admiring the scening fully allowing themselves to be immersed into the world.
In conclusion, live broadcasted theatre removes all the experiences from theatre except for the performance. It is unjust to staging, to acting, to lighting and to sound direction. It doesn’t capture the emotions of experiencing a play in an audience. It doesn’t allow for the social aspects of theatre, you don’t talk to people in a cinema during an act break as you would in a theatre house.
Perhaps that is why the price is so reduced; it is only part of the experience.
