In This ‘Tempest,’ the Magic Is Digital
S T R AT F O R D - U P O N - AVON , England — It’s the first act of “The Tempest,” and the shipwrecked conjurer Prospero is reminding the spirit Ariel of his miserable past — 12 years imprisoned by a witch inside a “cloven pine.” Theatergoers see two costumed actors, as always, but also, rising high above, a towering, gnarled tree, within which writhes a five-meter avatar of Ariel.
An hour or so later, Ariel morphs into a harpy — a ravenous monster with a woman’s face and breasts and a vulture’s talons and wings — soaring above the stage in a pixelated projection that traces the movements and facial expressions of an actor at stage left.
Here, in the birthplace of Shakespeare, theater artists and technologists are trying to reimagine stagecraft for the digital age.
Experimenting with one of Shakespeare’s greatest — and final — plays, the Royal Shakespeare Company, working with Intel and a London-based production company called the Imaginarium, has mounted a “Tempest” in which Ariel’s physical transformations are made visible with the most elaborate use of motion capture attempted in live theater.
“More than any other Shakespeare play, there’s magic in ‘ The Tempest,’ and I’ve desperately wanted there to be a sense of wonder in this play,” said Mark Quartley, the actor playing Ariel. “It’s thrilling to do it in live performance.”
The motion- capture process, in which Mr. Quartley’s movements are used to animate a digital creature, has been employed for years in film. But adapting it for theater has proved difficult.
“We’ve always wanted to marry performance capture with the stage,” said Andy Serkis, the actor who worked as the body behind Gollum and Kong and helped found Imaginarium. “But there are so many risks involved,” he said. “There’s no room for error.”
Mr. Serkis is serving as a creative consultant on this “Tempest” production.
The show is running in Stratford-upon-Avon until January 21 and will be onstage again at the Barbican Theater in London starting June 30. It is being broadcast to cinemas in Britain.
The spectacle is a sort of high-tech puppetry. The Ariel actor and the Ariel avatar are simultaneously vis- ible to the audience. In this way, the audience knows it is not watching prerecorded video.
Mr. Quartley speaks all the character’s lines and determines all of its motions, which, as a result, can vary from performance to performance. The avatar is deployed only when Ariel’s mind turns to magic.
At each performance, Mr. Quartley wears a skintight Lycra suit, with 16 motion sensors zipped into the costume and one embedded in his wig. They wirelessly transmit the coordinates of his body parts to computers that transform the data into the avatar projected onto screens moving over the stage. And other technological innovation is seeded throughout the production — 26 tracking cameras around the theater follow the movement of actors so that, for example, a pack of hounds can be projected onto hand-held drums held by dancers. In a masque scene, one goddess wears a fiber- optic fabric dress illuminated by LEDs.
“Theater has always embraced new technology — we go with any new idea, and we try to find out what it can do and what it can’t do,” said Gregory Doran, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It’s the words that excite you. The rest is just a way of letting people in.”