Guest Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

Guest Editor’s Introduction Susanne Greenhalgh In 2009, the Royal National Theatre secured research and development funding to create its own digital High Definition theater recordings, resulting in a streamed transmission of Racine’s Phèdre, starring Helen Mirren, to cinema audiences in the UK and beyond. Modeled on and informed by the Metropolitan Opera’s successful project to transmit its productions, which had begun three years earlier, the NT digital streaming was initially regarded as a more effective way than occasional touring to extend access to its work beyond London. Five years later, now with the strap line “Experience the Best of British Theatre at a Cinema near You,” the National Theatre has its own in-house production company, NT Live, and this innovative form of disseminating its repertoire has proved a critical and economic success, its worldwide ticket sales bringing in profits and royalties despite costs of around £200,000 for each digital production. The format for these presentations has been consolidated and is now copied by other institutions. Seasonal programming builds momentum and a returning audience, supported by in-cinema and online trailers, video clips and background material on websites, and social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, which are also utilized to gauge audience response and statistics and to generate a sense of interactivity. There is close liaison between the screen director and stage director from the start of rehearsals; a camera script is drawn up and tested in two full-scale filmed dressed rehearsals, while the multi-camera filming on the night can be fine-tuned by the mixing and editing of shots in response to live feed from the standard six to seven cameras, both fixed and mobile, providing a range of perspectives from “the best seats in the house.” For an institution that has boasted of producing 70 Shakespeare plays during its first half-century, the National Theatre has built up its NT Live Shakespearean content gradually, but the number of productions [End Page 255] now screened or imminent confirms that the canon is regarded as intrinsically suitable for, and deserving of, live digital dissemination. As has frequently been the case in the wake of other technological and media developments, Shakespeare serves both as guarantor of quality and a cover for innovation: a symbol, in Kate Rumbold’s words, of “enduring value and entrepreneurial creativity” (“From ‘Access’ to ‘Creativity’: Shakespeare Institutions, New Media, and the Language of Cultural Value,” Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3, 2010: 325). While the NT has livecast a wide range of plays from both the contemporary and classical repertoire, it is the Shakespeare productions that have arguably tested and developed its digital house style most fully, in the greatest variety of theater spaces. To date there have been eight NT Live relays of full length Shakespeare plays. All’s Well that Ends Well (Olivier, October 1 2009) provided the NT’s second livecast offering, directed in a mix of fairy-tale and early film style by Marianne Elliot and filmed by Robin Lough, NT Live Executive Producer. Season 2 of an increasingly varied repertoire included Nicholas Hytner’s Hamlet, with Rory Kinnear as the Prince (Olivier, December 9, 2009), and the first Shakespearean production by a partner institution, the intimate Donmar Warehouse’s King Lear, directed by Michael Grandage with a highly praised central performance by Derek Jacobi (February 3, 2010), which attracted a worldwide audience of almost 60,000 compared with 40,000 for Hamlet. Lenny Henry was a draw in the 2011/12 multicultural production of The Comedy of Errors (Olivier, March 1, 2012), directed by Dominic Cooke and filmed by Tim van Someren, while towards the end of that year Hytner’s production of a less well-known play, Timon of Athens (Olivier, November 1, 2012) was filmed by Lough on its last night, showcasing Simon Russell Beale’s performance in a modern dress version that highlighted the play’s contemporary relevance to a boom-and-bust society. Another partner institution, the Manchester International Festival, provided a widely welcomed opportunity to bring its sell-out production of Kenneth Branagh’s Macbeth, staged in a deconsecrated Manchester church in 2013, to the big screen, courtesy of van Someren. That...