Hello Las Vegas! How livestreaming is transforming the stage
As Christmas season dawned at the end of last year, two American critics had a crash course in that most British of theatre traditions, pantomime, dropping in remotely to eight shows for the New York Times. “I felt like an ethnographer studying a foreign culture’s strange ceremonies,” wrote one, while the other enjoyed the peppering of Covid-related jokes, including the insertion of “fiiiiiive toilet rolls” into The 12 Days of Christmas.
The song featured in Oh Yes We Are!, Perth theatre’s four-scene minipanto intended for small groups in a promenade performance, after the first lockdown made its Cinderella, on a conventional stage, impossible. But just as rehearsals were due to begin, new restrictions forced it online.
So, in 25 livestreamed performances over a fortnight, it played to an estimated 3,000 schoolchildren and nearly 10,000 households in 25 countries. On the first night, says dame, writer and director Barrie Hunter, they were astonished to find a family in Las Vegas cheering and booing along among the virtual audience.
The story of Oh Yes We Are! typifies the can-do response of the performing arts to a pandemic that has devastated their industry, putting thousands out of work and posing an existential threat to the buildings in which they ply their trades. Livestreaming wasn’t just a lifeline – it delivered a reach never dreamed of before. The first UK company to livestream a full-stage production during the pandemic was Emma Rice’s innovative Wise Children with
Romantics Anonymous, its soft-centred musical about the love that blooms between two socially awkward chocolate-makers (he suffers from nervous sweating, she faints when people look at her).
“I’m the biggest technophobe,” says Rice. “I find it hard to switch on the telly. I spent the beginning of lockdown strongly resisting, but I was pushed by our technical director Simon Baker. We used our own people. I was on camera and in headphones. We were filming and editing live. It was like the ensemble on stage had extended into the auditorium. I was more fearful than I’ve been for decades but the thrill is extraordinary.”
Baker was originally a sound designer and so was “used to bending existing technologies into things that live theatres need”. He has now become the go-to techie for a host of other companies – not least London’s Old Vic, which mounted a hugely successful four-show season of livestreamed productions culminating in an all-star revival of A Christmas Carol.
Matthew Warchus, Old Vic artistic director, recalls how it all began. “My crazy original idea for our first show, Lungs, was that Matt Smith and Claire Foy would turn up on stage, and me and my assistant would film them on our phones. So I called Simon and said, ‘Is this gonna work?’ And he said, ‘You probably need a little bit more kit than that.’ We worked our way through about four different cameras, as well as tripods, dollies and track, which radio mics to use, and which software to mix it all on.”
With ticket numbers limited to 1,000 but expanding to 5,000 over the season, these largely sold-out shows have paid their way – and, in the case of A Christmas Carol, provided work for 80 embattled freelancers. But Warchus points out that it has been a huge – and unsustainable – communal effort involving voluntary pay cuts for those staff who weren’t furloughed or made redundant, and stars making goodwill offerings of their services. Andrew Scott even managed to star in that rarest of things, a premiere during the pandemic. Three Kings, Stephen Beresford’s play about the fallout triggered by the return of an absent father, reached 72 countries.
But how much of this innovation will outlive the crisis? And could it even pose an existential threat to live perfor