How one theatre turned to film in the Covid era
The National Theatre is reimagining a stage play of Romeo & Juliet for a feature-length film. Is it the industry’s best hope for now?
LIKE CINEMA, MOST theatres have been hit hard by the pandemic. Crisis calls for innovation, and the National Theatre in London is responding with an unusual move: leaping into an entirely different medium. The Southbank-based arts venue is morphing a stage production of Romeo & Juliet, with Josh O’connor and Jessie Buckley — postponed from the summer due to coronavirus restrictions — into a featurelength television film; a first for the theatre, says Emily Burns, a resident director who is adapting the play for the screen. “This project,” she says, “is us thinking, ‘How else could we use a camera to tell a story for an audience that can’t come into a theatre anymore?’”
With O’connor and Buckley still on board, along with most of the original cast, filming will take place on the stage of the NT’S Lyttelton Theatre, a space temporarily converted into a film studio. But it is not simply a filmed play (as with the popular ‘NT Live’ scheme) nor a conventional film. “It’s really a hybrid form of theatre and film,” says Burns. “We’re learning lots. Conceptually, it’s not even about meeting in the middle, but going, ‘What’s the most exciting option for how to tell this story?’”
Burns is keeping schtum on specific details of what that will look like, except to say that it’s a “contemporary setting” that will run to 90 minutes (half the normal running time for the play) and that it “engages with the idea that a theatre is closed”, suggesting a slightly meta spin on the love story. But though other theatres are yet to experiment in a new medium, she’s cautiously optimistic. “I don’t know how tenable it is, as a long-term income stream. But I think it’s certainly a brilliant opportunity. It’s made us think more rigorously about how film can help us reach more people.”
After all, it is not the first time theatre has been hit by a pandemic. “Every major plague has affected the theatre in some way,” Burns notes. “The plague of 1570 meant the theatre went on tour for the first time, and reached Stratford — and that’s where William Shakespeare sees his first play. Plagues have always affected a huge change in theatre.” The course of theatre never did run smooth — but perhaps it’s found a way, for now.
THE NATIONAL THEATRE’S ROMEO & JULIET WILL AIR ON SKY ARTS IN 2021