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AThe Christmas season kicked off late last year, with two US critics taking a crash course in most of Britain’s theatrical traditions, pantomime, moving from a distance to eight shows for The New York Times. “I felt like an ethnographer studying the strange ceremonies of a foreign culture,” one wrote, while the other enjoyed the brilliance of Covid-related jokes, including the insertion of “fiiiiiive rolls of toilet paper »In The 12 Days of Christmas.
The song featured in Oh Yes We Are !, the Perth Theater’s four-stage mini panto for small groups on a stroll, after the first lockdown made her Cinderella, on a conventional stage, impossible. But as rehearsals were due to begin, new restrictions forced him online.
Thus, in 25 performances broadcast live over a fortnight, it was presented to around 3,000 schoolchildren and nearly 10,000 households in 25 countries. On the first night, says lady, writer and director Barrie Hunter, they were amazed to find a family in Las Vegas clapping and booing among the virtual audience.
The story of Oh Yes We Are! characterizes the performing arts’ positive response to a pandemic that has devastated their industry, putting thousands of people out of work and posing an existential threat to the buildings in which they work. Live streaming wasn’t just a lifeline – it provided reach you never dreamed of before. The first UK company to live-stream a full production during the pandemic was Emma Rice’s innovative Wise Children with Romantics Anonymous, her love-centric musical that flourishes between two socially awkward chocolatiers (he suffers from nervous sweating, she faints when people look at her).
“I’m the biggest technophobe,” Rice says. “I have trouble turning on the TV. I spent the start of the lockout resisting strongly, but was pushed by our technical director Simon Baker. We used our own people. I was in front of the camera and in the headphones. We toured and edited live. It was as if the ensemble on stage had spread out in the auditorium. I was more scared than I have been in decades, but the thrill is extraordinary.
Baker was originally a sound designer and was therefore “used to turning existing technologies into things that live theaters need”. He’s now become the go-to technician for a host of other companies – most notably London’s Old Vic, which put together a hugely successful four-show season of live-broadcast productions, culminating in an all-star revival of A Christmas Carol.
Matthew Warchus, artistic director of Old Vic, remembers how it all began. “My crazy original idea for our first show, Lungs, was for Matt Smith and Claire Foy to take the stage, and my assistant and I would film them on our phones. So I called Simon and I said, “Is this going to work?” And he said, “You probably need a little more kit than that.” We went through about four different cameras, as well as tripods, carts, and tracks, which radio mics to use, and software to mix it all up. “
With tickets capped at 1,000 but increasing to 5,000 over the course of the season, these largely sold-out shows paid their way – and, in the case of A Christmas Carol, provided work for 80 besieged freelancers. But Warchus points out it’s been a huge – and unsustainable – community effort involving voluntary pay cuts for employees who haven’t been fired or fired, and stars making goodwill offers of their services. Andrew Scott even managed to star in this rarer of things, a first during the pandemic. Three Kings, Stephen Beresford’s play about the fallout from the return of an absent father, has reached 72 countries.
But how much of this innovation will survive the crisis? And could he even pose an existential threat to live performances when the real audience can finally return? The National Theater – which last summer drew 15 million viewers in 173 countries for a season of free performances – recently announced that it is expanding its NT Live component into a paid service. But although all seven plays on the new platform were filmed during live shows, they are not live in the sense of being shown simultaneously, so they are not that likely to affect sales. of seats.
Nicholas Kenyon, director of the multiplatform Barbican Center in London, points out that the Metropolitan Opera in New York has been broadcasting live since 2006 with no obvious audience loss. The Barbican made its live debut in October, with 12 concerts filmed live with distant audiences. “There is definitely a positive side,” he says, “but I think that’s not going to rule out live. It will be a new balance, a hybrid: a performance designed for both audiences. How feasible that will be when theaters start to fill up again is, he concedes, a moot point.
Wigmore Hall is hosting 40 more free concerts online in the run-up to Easter, broadcast from the empty hall and has raised almost £ 1million since the initiative launched in June.
The Edinburgh Traverse, meanwhile, have set up a bespoke online venue, Traverse 3, and used the cancellation of last year’s Edinburgh Festival as a chance to mount their own virtual season. , which turned out to be so successful that it made 12 of them available for free download for a limited time. time. “As much as anything else,” says executive producer Linda Crooks, “it’s about trying to engage with the audience and the artists. Since we received relief funds in July, we’ve worked with over 200 independent artists – at least 300 if you count the indirect collaboration. We used it as an opportunity to explore digital, seeing it simply as a distant way of making art.
Perhaps the most encouraging innovation is the growth of collaboration. Theatrical Provocateurs Headlong and English Touring Theater have partnered with more than 25 other tour companies for Signal Fires, set up to be performed live on local networks or broadcast nationally in the spirit of keeping the campfires alive. . When Liverpool, where Headlong was due to present his contribution, was closed, they switched to phones, projecting the number on the side of a bombed-out church so passers-by could call to hear David Morrissey or Leanne Best perform a scary. story, The Ghost Caller.
While small and young businesses have been hit the hardest, they also have the opportunity to try out new ideas. Many were starting to do it anyway. Dante or Die recreated a show designed to be played in coffee shops in what they decided to call a video podcast. Using the home screen of a mobile phone as a scene, User Not Found offered intelligent thinking about how our digital identities will survive us. It stars Luka, who left 33,000 tweets for her ex-lover to delete, which is “about the length of The Brothers Karamazov”.
Tour company Uninvited Guests, meanwhile, turned one of its existing shows into Love Letters from Home, which invited song signings and personal messages from a Zoom audience. “It was always a very intimate show,” says director Paul Clarke. “We sat around tables, much like a wedding reception, and served cava to the audience. But what we’ve found is that, in some ways, it’s even more intimate when artists move from their own domestic spaces into people’s homes.
The crisis has accelerated the rise of a new breed of theater artist, according to Headlong’s Holly Race Roughan. “We may be theater / digital / fashion designers,” she says (this development was dubbed “generation slash” by Kwame Kwei-Armah of Young Vic). “This is partly linked to capitalism and job insecurity. But the theater lets you say, “I’m currently sitting in a bucket, but we’re going to imagine we’re on the ocean.” And it allows you to apply it on many different platforms. I think we’ll see a bleeding between the forms, a new inventiveness on the horizon.
Emma Rice has no doubts. “I’m evangelical about it,” she said. “I’m at that point in life where it’s hard to surprise yourself and you don’t struggle artistically anymore. So you have to notice when you are out of balance – because that is where the excitement lies. It made me a lot more visually aware and I think I will incorporate this “film lens” into my work. We don’t capture performance. We capture a shared moment of living humanity. “
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