I cannot but vividly recall my excitement when I discovered that David Tennant, a sometime idol of mine, was to take the titular role in Gregory Doran’s RSC production of Richard II. It had taken on an almost mythical status in my imagination; I couldn’t miss it.
I was, alas, to be callously tortured, as the tickets evaporated from the RSC website in a matter of seconds. I clicked and typed my way to the re-sale pages with feverish desperation, but the price was already three figures long and climbing before my very eyes and I was doomed to look wistfully on as five-star reviews gush from the pages of the Saturday papers — curse the social elites and journalists with their privileged access! “Go thou and fill another room in hell!”
But lo! What is this Internet advertisement hovering out of the mist of page 33 of your Google search? “RSC live, showing Doran’s Richard II in a cinema near you…” I could hardly believe my hope-starved eyes! I was going to see the production after all, and for the inconceivably reasonable price of £12, with popcorn!
I did go to see Richard II in my local Cineworld and I enjoyed it immensely, but it left me wondering whether there are some fundamental differences between the mediums of film and theatre that could never allow the stage to transfer to the screen with any real impact. The opportunities for greater accessibility not only for theatre, but opera, ballet, concerts et al are impossible to ignore.
For performances and concerts often made exclusive and unreachable by a finite number of seats or an astronomic price tag, the cinema is ideally positioned to allow prospective audiences the chance to experience what they would have missed. NT Live has broadcast to 550 cinemas in the UK and more than 1,100 venues worldwide, meaning that 3.5 million more people were able, to all intents and purposes, to go to the theatre. Could cinema be the cheap alternative to the perennial problem of expensive (and therefore exclusionary) performances? But what exactly are we getting access to?
The camera, while undoubtedly an artistic tool in itself, imposes a distance between the audience and the stage, which simply cannot allow for the total sensory experience that productions at the Globe or the National Theatre often are.
The proximity of your body to the actors’ and to the stage is fundamental in the creation of something real and visceral, something that follows you from your seat as you leave the auditorium. What’s more, a camera’s eye is inevitably selective, whereas yours may roam about the stage and set with abandon. When filmed, little, but delightful details that for part of the stage-play’s charm are missed as the camera swings and switches between the leads. The film cannot but select and deselect on the audience’s behalf: an inevitability that enriches film, but diminishes the theatrical production.
That said, the immediacy is not dissipated between the screen and the eye; it changes. Cameras can zoom in and catch fragments, twitches and beads of sweat that our eyes would miss. We are now, in a perverse way, closer to the actor and yet further from the production, which is no longer delivered as a total and ever-present picture, but as a series of close and intense visions, interspersed with wider glimpses of the stage.
For a particularly choice example of this technique, go to Elliot Levey’s tight-lipped and drawn Don Jon in Digital Theatre’s broadcast of Josie Rourke’s Much Ado About Nothing. I would, therefore, go so far as to say that, while it will never be the same, theatre in the cinema is something else altogether. Cine-theatre, when done well, combines the intensity of a well-held camera angle, with the raw power of a live theatre performance.
And if cinemas get the chance to broadcast some ‘alternative content’ and more people than ever are able to witness the ineffable greatness of David Tennant, then long may it continue.
