Hamlet performed by the Royal National Theatre (review)

Perhaps because its story was presumed to be unproblematic and its reception guaranteed, the National Theatre Live cinema broadcast of the popular War Horseon February 27, 2014, felt no need to place an on-screen presenter before the show to introduce and “explain” what was to come. For the other NT Live broadcasts, including each of the eight Shakespeare productions to date, the audience has been addressed by a host, who has often been the broadcaster Emma Freud. Bubbling over with informal excitement, she has sought to reassure us both about the achievement of what we are to see and its accessibility. “We’re thrilledto be presenting this massively acclaimedproduction of Hamlet[. . .] with Rory Kinnear’s brilliantperformance” (emphases added), she enthused before this particular cinema broadcast. The conventions associated with such an on-screen host, including this relentlessly upbeat tone, were taken over from the cinema presentations of Met Opera Live in HD, initiator of the current trend for live streamed digital performance, which in turn adopted them from television and radio broadcasts of operas and classical music. They are a reminder of the centrality of key aspects of “the televisual” to this intermedial form that also draws on “the theatrical” for its object and “the cinematic” for the technological, spectacular, and social contexts of its reception. Liveness-at-a-distance is essentially televisual, as is the grammar of an image sequence created by real-time “mixing” between the continuous feeds of multiple cameras, each controlled by an operator changing its framing, focus, and position.

In his pre-show comments for the Hamletbroadcast, stage director Nicholas Hytner stressed the theatricality of his modern-day production, which was set in a Baroque palace imagined to be the headquarters of a totalitarian state today. “But you can see the workings,” he said; “you can see the scaffolding that [the walls] are mounted on, you can see the rig that the lighting hangs from, you can see a rather consciously theatrical floor.” The truth, however, was that for almost the length of the broadcast, the cinema audience could notsee these elements. The cameras closed in on the action, framing the characters within the set and excluding (apart from frequent glimpses of the tape-marked floor) the frames, poles, and bars of the self-reflexively theatrical design.

The screen direction also minimized the theatricality of the scene changes, which on stage had walls moving and furniture being carried on in full view of the audience. During these transitions, which were accompanied by deafening jet engine roars or pounding rock music, the cameras tended to feature a close-up of a character against a dark ground and then reveal a new configuration of the setting at the start of the next scene. Nor was there any indication in these framings of the boundaries of the stage or the presence of a theater audience. At the start and during the interval, the featured auditorium shot offered only a high, oblique, and partial view of the playing area. This was a cinema broadcast of a theater play that, for much of the time, aspired to the condition of television.

It was as if a determinedly...