Recently,
however, there is no denying I have become a major fan of live streaming – the
technology that allows a theatre performance to be broadcast live to cinemas
around the country, or even around the world, giving you front row seats at a
fraction of the current cost of tickets to the theatre.
In the last
couple of months, I have been to two such live-streams: David Tennant’s Richard II at the RSC,
directed by Greg Doran, and Tom Hiddleston’s Coriolanus at the Donmar
Warehouse, directed by Josie Rourke. Both these performances were sold out
almost as soon as tickets went on sale, so my chances of seeing either of them
in the theatres was virtually nil.
Richard II
If you have
never been to a live-stream, you might imagine that what you see is just the
view from a fixed-point camera, perhaps from the middle of the dress
circle. But it’s far more
sophisticated than that. Somehow,
without interfering with the live performance, they position cameras at
multiple angles, and take you, at times, right in close to the actors’ faces, so that you catch
details of the performance you wouldn’t see unless you had front row seats –
and perhaps no even then.
Both Richard
II and Coriolanus suffer from the fact that their central characters are not particularly
easy to like. Tennant’s Richard II reeled in the audience’s sympathies over the
course of the play, moving from an effete arrogance born of his certainty in
his divine right to rule, to a resigned humility as he accepts his fate.
One of the
pleasures of a live-stream is that you are often treated to little interviews
with the cast and crew before the performance and in the interval. In this
case, before the play began, we heard an interview with the director, Gregory
Doran, who described Tennant as
“constitutionally incapable of not making a line sound like modern
English,” – gift that allows him to draw out some of the bitter humour Richard finds
in his own downfall.
Richard II
also marks the first return to the stage of Jean Lapotaire since the brain
haemorrhage she suffered in 2000, in the small but significant role as the
widow to the murdered Gloucester.
We also
heard the designer, Stephen Brimson Lewis, talk about going back to an old
technology to create a very modern-seeming effect. Curtains made of strings of fine glass beads (‘a bit like
the chain on your sink plug’) were hung in graduated layers through the depth
of the stage. Onto this were projected images – like the nave of the cathedral
in the opening scene – creating an illusion of depth. And because the curtains were semi-transparent, actors could
move behind and between them, accentuating the effect.
Coriolanus
In contrast
to the grandeur of the Richard II set, the live-stream of Coriolanus came from
the tiny Donmar Warehouse - a
converted banana ripening shed in London’s Covent Garden. The stage is a simple
square, surrounded on three sides by banks of seats, and this stark simplicity
was used to conjure the idea of a Roman arena. The only set dressing was graffiti projected onto the back
wall and the only props a ladder and a few chairs.
Tom
Hiddleston is young and athletic, and he brings a different dynamic to the play
than the older actors who are typically cast. (As Emma Freud asked in her
interview of the director, Josie Rourke, during the interval, “MTV named Tom
Hiddleston as the sexiest man on the planet – so why exactly did you cast him as Coriolanus…?”) And they are not averse to making the
most of that athleticism – sending
him scrambling up ladders at the
siege of Corioles where he earns his name and afterwards having him stand,
half-naked, as he showers blood from his body.
Deborah
Findlay is impressive as Volumnia – surely one of the strongest female roles in
any of Shakespeare’s tragedies. But the revelation of this production, for me,
was Mark Gatiss as Menenius. I love his Mycroft, but I have been in two minds
about some of the other things I have seen him in. but here he displayed the same gift as Tennant – making
every word seem perfectly understandable and creating a character the audience
could relate to as if this were contemporary drama.
The other
piece of surprise casting was Birgitte Hjort Sørensen (Borgen’s Katrine
Fønsmark) as Coriolanus’s wife Virgilia. It is a part with very few speaking
lines and you might think she was wasted on it (especially as her English
appears flawless and almost unaccented). But one of the things I have noticed
about Scandanavian television actors is that that are often expected to express
a great deal without using any words at all. Because of the
way the play was staged, Virgilia is on view to the audience almost the
whole time, and especially for this live-cast, where the camera often comes in
very close to the actors’ faces, Sørensen has great scope to express all the fear, anger and grief of a
soldier’s wife.
Coriolanus
is the least known of
Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Unlike,
say, Hamlet or Julius Caesar, much of the audience will come to it not knowing
the story – and most of all, not knowing the ending. Josie Rourke and her cast would like to keep it that way, so
I won’t spoil it for you. Sufficeth to say that it made full use of Hiddleston’s
athleticism, and that even filtered through a screen, it was shocking.