No audience with the Queen and Philip
Crown stars perform live for you in empty theatre
OUR theatre folk are some of the most resourceful creatures on earth. Not even coronavirus can stop them. If there’s a whiff of an audience, they’ll seize it faster than the Prince of Denmark can mutter ‘to be or not to be’.
So it is this week with the Old Vic Theatre’s restaging of last year’s Lungs, starring Claire Foy and Matt Smith (of The Crown), and an astonishing Zoomstaging of Sebastian Faulks’s World War I story Birdsong.
At the Old Vic they’ve done their darnedest to recreate the buzz of the theatre, with tickets for livestreamed shows restricted to the number of seats in the auditorium, and a frontofhouse manager barking ‘please take your seats!’ She certainly had me scurrying to the loo and fumbling for my glasses.
Once it’s started, two cameras allow Foy and Smith to maintain social distancing on stage in Duncan Macmillan’s play that — by coincidence — happens to be about a couple who are psychologically much more than 2m apart. It starts with an argument in Ikea and evolves into a fullscale meltdown about having a baby.
Macmillan spins us through space and time cleverly in Matthew Warchus’s production, filmed against the Old Vic’s empty seats. The problem with the 90minute yarn is that it’s hard to root for a couple who are unwilling to make sacrifices for each other.
And the only colour comes from Foy’s formidably selfabsorbed acting and Smith’s blokeish whimsy.
Being live, there are technical issues, too. The screen blanked out twice during the Saturday matinee, microphones crackled and both actors drifted in and out of focus. Even so, because you can’t pause or rewind, the show does capture some of the energy of live performance.
But without an audience, it was hard to judge the tone of the play. Such is the adversarial joy of theatre: a three way dispute between you, the stage and the stranger sitting next to you.
THE want of an audience is no less of a problem for prerecorded plays online. But where the Original Theatre Company’s production of Birdsong trumps Lungs is in the way it tells its emotionally gripping tale with such extraordinary creativity.
Just when you thought there was nothing left to do with a story that’s been a bestseller, top film and hit play, it’s turned into a Zoom show. It has no right to live in such cramped conditions, but it’s all the more amazing for it.
Filmed and edited in just six weeks, using 14 actors isolated at home — plus narration from the author himself — this is a staggering achievement.
Yes, it’s limited almost entirely to closeups in front of laptops. But greenscreen technology allows the editors to take us from rural French gardens down into the tunnels below the Somme.
Although the views can be static, James Findlay’s fiddleplaying and folk songs add oodles of atmosphere.
But it’s the characters, lit and madeup to the highest professional standards, that really moved me.
Tim Treloar is outstanding as the Cockney sapper who prays that God will take his life rather than that of his son, suffering from diphtheria.
Tom Kay, as officer Stephen Wraysford makes a yearning hunk; and Madeleine Knight is no less passionate as his beloved Isabelle, trapped in an abusive marriage.
Some of the special effects are a bit Twilight Zone. But this is a pioneering work that’s remarkably assured. A bit like the birth of the silent movies, it could even be the start of something big.