Dramas at Home

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First there was an open-air version of Into the Woods at Regent’s Park, then David Suchet and Zoë Wanamaker in All My Sons at the Apollo Theatre, and finally Siân Phillips in Lovesong at the Lyric, Hammersmith. I didn’t leave home, it cost me less than the price of a theatre program, and I may have been watching the beginning of an e-theatre revolution.

British-based Digital Theatre films live performance, which it packages and sells through the internet. Through their website you can hire a play, opera or ballet to watch, or download to own. You can also take out a very cheap monthly subscription for a changing selection of titles on YouTube which can also be viewed on computers, mobile devices and televisions.

These are not recordings of an event from a cameraman in the front row, or from a camera sweeping high over the auditorium. We are on stage with the performers. Fixed cameras around the auditorium and on stage are controlled from a central point. Two performances are filmed and the editing is done from the huge amount of video—you don’t get the bit where the actor fluffed a speech or two. A stage performance is no longer a memory, it’s present tense. The final product to be released is still a theatrical production. This is a stage set, these are play actors, occasional noise is heard from the audience. The images are high definition, clear sound, the cutting and use of close-ups are intelligent and exciting and the editing is done in co-operation with the theatre director.

The magical experience of being in a theatre with living actors, something talked fondly about by people who never go, is a much over-rated pastime. Actors aren’t concerned that you can’t hear them, directors aren’t concerned that you can’t see what is happening, and writers drool with pleasure if they can get audience members to walk out. With Digital Theatre the view from home is better than being there. You can criticise the leading lady (in a non-misogynist way), pause to let the dogs out, and you don’t have to clap. Theatre, from a reserved seat on the couch, is an additional pleasure for regular theatre-goers and new pleasure for virgins or lapsed members of the congregation.

Digital Theatre or something similar could take Australian theatre to an international audience—and expose the poverty of so much of the prize-accumulating new writing that washes onto our government-funded stages. In theory a play from a dynamic small company could compete with offerings from the most well-known and established theatre companies. There could also be a profitable international market for theatre bon-bons. Last year’s Christmas season production of The Importance of Being Earnest by the MTC with Geoffrey Rush as Lady Bracknell could have been a world pleaser.

Digital Theatre may challenge companies like Bell Shakespeare who are heavily dependent on the education market. Read a scene from Shakespeare in the classroom then watch it played in a theatrical setting on personal laptops or a big television screen versus organising a school excursion for texting, Facebook-updating students. Digital Theatre offers choice which could appeal to educators. They might choose a Bell-type burlesque production of Much Ado About Nothing with two stars from Doctor Who, David Tennant and Catherine Tate, or a Tudor recreation of Henry IV, Part I from the Globe Theatre, or Jonathan Pryce in King Lear from the Almeida theatre. Without leaving the classroom students could see three modern ways of performing Shakespeare in first-rate productions.

The company’s catalogue of British theatre is not huge but it is growing. There are opera and ballet from the Royal Opera House, Shakespeare from the new Globe and the Royal Shakespeare, and new writing from the Royal Court, Young Vic and so many more. The performances I watched were just three in my YouTube subscription. Two I watched on laptop and the third when I linked the computer to the television.

Pulp fiction

The 2010 production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at London’s Apollo Theatre was a class act with a big set, and big stars. Sold as a “classic” twentieth-century American play, it was staged as an archaeological find, a sparkling artefact from a lost civilisation. It looks big, because our theatre got small. William Dudley’s rich traditional set design of a mid-century American backyard with trees, lawn and verandahed wooden house framed the naturalistic playing which won critics’ awards for David Suchet, Zoë Wanamaker and director Howard Davies. Those who gave the awards were sitting in the stalls. Digital Theatre takes you on stage, into the play. The naturalistic playing and in-their-face camera views are satisfyingly voyeuristic: a master class in sweat-and-tears acting.

The Keller family’s eldest son was a pilot who was reported missing and now, three years later, his mother (Zoë Wanamaker) refuses to accept that he is dead. Her husband, David Suchet’s convivial Joe Keller, was a war profiteer. A partner in a firm making aeroplane parts, he was responsible for the delivery of a consignment of faulty pieces to the air force. The young pilots and crew who died as a result give the play its title—All My Sons. He then shifted all blame to his partner, who is serving a prison sentence. Over the period of time covered by the three-act play the past catches up with him. It’s a sudsy soap script. Son Chris (Stephen Campbell-Moore) is in love with his dead brother’s fiancée (Jemima Rooper) who is the daughter of the jailed partner and has been invited to stay and who has a letter showing that the missing pilot son suicided when he learnt of his father’s plane-stopping activities. Howard Davies plays down the melodrama and plays up the “classic”. Brilliant as always, Zoë Wanamaker had her foot heavily on the brake pedal when Miller’s text tried to steer her role perilously close to a stage Jewish mom, an achievement worthy of a critics’ award in itself. And Suchet is simply superbly Suchet.

Since it premiered in 1947 the blight of relevance and topicality has dropped away and it plays to modern audiences as a suspenseful thriller. Pulp story-telling, nowhere as easy as it looks, carries us along as the carefully plotted plot locks into place. The expansive three-act narrative is a pleasurable antidote to popular contemporary playwriting which has diminished into fast-tracked, eighty-minute pile-ups on the cultural highway. An important plus for Digital Theatre is that it gives young playwrights access to a living repository of plays and productions for them to explore and possibly reinvent in their own work.

All My Sons is one of the plays from the first half of the American twentieth century which emerged from a confident people with a sense of their own national destiny and a desire to improve, not to destroy. An Australian riff on All My Sons would likely send us back to the Vietnam 1960s and involve a maker of faulty Hills Hoists impaling housewives: possible title—All My Daughters. The present golden age in American television comes from a nation on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

Grimm musical

Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods is an open-air production in Regent’s Park. Intertwining the stories of Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk with the Baker and his Wife and a Witch, it goes beyond the “happily ever after” endings into Sondheim territory. The Big Bad Wolf doubles as Prince Charming and the voice of Dame Judi Dench as the voice of Mrs Giant. Big screen, big pleasure.

Tears before bedtime

Lovesong is a ninety-minute weepie. Two couples, the same people when young and old, share the sparsely furnished stage and we look at them at the beginning of their lives together and at the end. Atmospheric starlings occasionally sweep across the backcloth sky as mood music tinkles nostalgically. Author Abi Morgan also wrote The Iron Lady (run fast) and Birdsong (watch on DVD). The production was choreographed and directed by Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett from UK company Frantic Assembly. Physical theatre, in which text, dance and music are combined, can be worse than tiresome if weak stories splutter when flooded with dance or song elements that are no more than pretentious add-ons. Lovesong is expertly done, its sentimentality doesn’t hurt (until you think about it), and watching through the intimate eyes of Digital Theatre may be even better than seeing it in a theatre.

Onstage comes Sam Cox as elderly Billy. His movements turn into dance. The filming highlights the scene’s intimacy. Billy has been married to Maggie (Siân Phillips) for a long time. Phillips is one of those actresses superlatives were invented for. Like all goddesses she has played in some doggy television and movies. Her cheekbones are from the Dietrich production line—she impersonated her in a musical. I thought she was old when she was the marvellous, thoroughly wicked Livia in the 1975 series I Claudius (she was the one who poisoned off most of the cast) but it must have been makeup. The production is worth clicking on just to watch her, and soak in her glorious snob voice. I won’t even mention that she was married to Peter O’Toole, for a while.

The younger version of the couple are played by Edward Bennett and Leanne Rowe. The play never really gets how bizarre we would find each other if our young selves and older selves actually met. The playwright has an idea that it was very 1960s behaviour for the husband and wife to argue because he, a financially struggling dentist (seriously), doesn’t want his wife to work. The writer also heavily loads him with failings. He, being male, has affairs and drinks vodka at all times. She, being a librarian, is faithful though tempted and is moderate in all things. It’s a conventional stage world girt by gender platitudes. The man who invented the chemical revolution, which is feminism, has a lot to answer for.

As the couples from different times cross the stage there are moments of shared dance. The bit to look out for is when the younger man lifts Siân Phillips elegantly up and winds her around his shoulders and back to earth. The dance on the bed is also good, and original.

The play ticks towards Maggie’s suicide. It’s tissue time when she rings a friend to get her to take her (their?) cat before her fast approaching appointment with the pill bottles. Friend isn’t at home so there is a nice weepy monologue. It could be Helen of Troy telling Menelaus she won’t be home tonight. Tissues are again out when elderly couple sit down and she takes pills. Wipe away the tears and happily applaud and then the hangover strikes.

I seem to have missed the part about exactly why Maggie is suiciding. She doesn’t seem really unwell and it all looks a bit glib compared with what actual couples go through when one of them is seriously ill. It also seems a bit suicidal to encourage the demise of elderly ladies in the audience, given the always perilous finances of most theatres. The actors might not notice that their audience has popped out forever but the box office would. And the arrangements she makes for Billy’s life after she pills off are a bit strange. He’s told to travel, revisit Lascaux for the paintings. Maybe, at his age, he doesn’t want to go. She gives away their house, so where is he going to live? He pushes the pills towards her, she shovels them down. The author seems to have missed the final cue for police sirens.

Fine print: Performances can be hired or purchased from Digital Theatre or obtained by subscribing to YouTube, where a limited but changing selection is available. At present the YouTube subscription is $5.99 a month after a fourteen-day free trial. Instructional videos for viewing are available on YouTube and at www.digitaltheatre.com.