The next act: how the pandemic is shaping online theatre's future
In the past six months, theatre has offered us comfort, provocation and entertainment. Not always live theatre, of course, but a virtual subgenre emerging out of pandemic darkness in the form of online dramas. These productions have ranged from splashy, multi-camera films of existing shows to quick-response plays made on a shoestring and beamed into our living rooms as dramatised video calls, aural dramas, interactive Zoom plays and monologues about lockdown life. Where is the place of such drama now that live theatre is whirring back into motion? Will we continue to sit in front of our screens rather than making our way back to auditoriums or has this virtual substitute served its purpose?
There is compelling evidence to suggest that the archive arm of online theatre – films of the plays – has secured an expanded place in the industry. The National Theatre’s NT at Home scheme was one of the biggest virtual successes of lockdown; it screened 17 productions and garnered more than 15m views from audiences in more than 170 countries. Here was entertainment for the masses, creating the same event-theatre moment as a live show but on a global scale, and free of charge (with an option to donate). It brought some redress to an art form often deemed too expensive and stuck in an elite bubble. The filmed version of Hamilton had a similar effect. For the price of a subscription to the Disney+ channel, we could watch a musical whose ticket prices would have been beyond the reach of many in its live incarnation.
The National acknowledges it was surprised by the reach of its scheme. Emma Keith, its head of broadcast and NT Live, says that the high audience numbers were retained right until the end. What’s more, people donated, in small sums, although this did not provide enough to keep the theatre afloat during lockdown in itself. So how did it serve the organisation? “It was about democratisation really,” says Keith. “We felt we had to give people some way to keep the habit going and entice others to watch it.”
The question now, says Keith, is how to make such a scheme commercially sustainable, and the costs are hefty – the filming alone for each NT Live production is between £300,000 and £500,000. Where will this money be found at a time when live theatre is struggling to get on its feet? More fundamentally, Keith points out that this digital offering is dependent on the existence of physical theatre. “We need live theatre in order to do what we do digitally.”
Rupert Goold, artistic director of the Almeida in London, which this summer released a screen version of Mike Bartlett’s play Albion, says that was made possible because the BBC paid for its filming. But he can conceive of a future model in which theatres pair up with digital platforms: “I remember talking to a super agent who spoke about a channel, like Netflix for example, that could persuade all theatres to capture their digital productions on one channel. It could work, but it would require very joined up thinking. If it could be done, it would solve problems of London-centric theatre and accessibility.”
However, there is a cheaper and arguably more creative road to go down, and that is in creating online work from scratch. An explosion of such shows – either recorded or streamed live on YouTube or Zoom – has brought invention, resourcefulness and hybridity of form.
The best of them have come in the shape of theatrical activism, especially amid the Black Lives Matter movement, made cheaply and with a speed that a live theatrical production could never match. These have included a YouTube series about racism experienced by British East Asians as a result of Covid-19, the Bush theatre’s The Protest after the killing of George Floyd, and Roy Williams’s 846, all of which combined the arts, politics and activism. There has also been the Almeida’s Shifting Tides series, which focused on climate activism in audio plays made by their young actors.
Can these continue to exist? They can and they should, says Ola Ince, a theatre director who made several digital dramas during lockdown, including 846, a film in the BBC series Unprecedented, and a story in the forthcoming series of Grimm Tales. “These are much more like short films that are theatrical – they contain the essence of theatre via a different medium. And what it means is that people who can’t afford theatre can watch them and also that different access requirements are being met. Buildings can be really intimidating places where racism is practised. This way feels safer for some people, and I don’t want to stop engaging with people who I have never had the opportunity to engage with before. It’s about creating more than one experience, not an either/or.”
While some digital productions have shown fantastic formal originality – such as Belarus Free Theatre’s experimental Zoom show A School for Fools – the form has more often been a dramatised Zoom conversation and subject matter has focused on the everyday realities of pandemic life. The latest Apple Family plays written by Richard Nelson show four middle-aged American siblings mulling over lockdown life remotely in their own homes. While beautifully composed and sensationally acted, they are so much a simulacrum of life that they feel less like art, more like an eloquent documentation of pandemic anxiety.
A current Zoom series made by the Gate theatre, called Letters, similarly focuses on pandemic life: two artists read out letters to each other that were written during lockdown. They read poetry, too, alongside dressing up and dancing as we watch. However creative the concept, it feels like awkwardly retrospective and quotidian subject matter. It may be the case that our noses are pressed too closely to lockdown for this kind of drama to say anything insightful about it, beyond the obvious and overfamiliar.
While online drama is cheaper to make than its live counterpart, there is growing discomfort about the proper payment of artists involved. Writers and actors have reportedly worked for tiny sums out of goodwill and a desire to keep up their professional profile. Paul Fleming, the incoming general secretary of Equity, says the trade union has had to stop some theatre companies from making online productions because of their low rates.
The interplay between live and digital shows has brought about innovation: 846 was recently turned from an aural drama into a live production; the Old Vic’s In-Camera shows are essentially live stage productions (albeit in empty auditoriums) that are made for digital consumption. These shows, Goold says, can spark the same “water-cooler communality”. The most exciting hybridity comes from a combination of live and digital, he says, and cites his theatre’s marathon, 12-hour live streaming of The Iliad and The Odyssey in 2015. Goold’s digital plans, he says, are “geared towards diversifying what you think of as theatre”.
The Young Vic’s artistic director, Kwame Kwei-Armah, who has long advocated virtual operations alongside physical theatre, thinks that lockdown has left us all with the gift of a parallel industry. His theatre is opening a production next month, The New Tomorrow, as an in-house event and a streamed show on Facebook Live.
“We will really understand where virtual theatre and new digital technology coexist in about three years’ time, when – hopefully – we’ve come through this part of Covid. It will be in the DNA, and the subconscious of, an emerging generation of theatre-makers who will remember this time when they couldn’t get into theatres and make their art.”