“We Are Not Making a Movie”: Constituting Theatre in Live Broadcast

In the introduction to his landmark text Liveness, Philip Auslander references a banner outside Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre reading “Not Available on Video” as emblematic of theatre’s particular preoccupation with its own liveness, pointing out that “the only way of imputing specificity to the experience of live performance in the current cultural climate is by reference to the dominant experience of mediatization” (5).¹ Further, he notes that when “the live itself incorporates the mediatized,” as contemporary theatre practice regularly does, that incorporation is manifested “both technologically and epistemologically,” altering not only how theatre is made, but how we recognize and apprehend it. “The result of this implosion,” he writes, “is that a seemingly secure opposition is now a site of anxiety” (44). Perhaps nowhere is that implosion more explicitly demonstrated than in the live broadcast of theatre from the stage to cinemas, as in the National Theatre’s NT Live series or the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Live from Stratford-upon-Avon. Live broadcast theatre complicates the putative ontological separation between staged performances and screened ones—between the theatre the companies broadcast and the films the venues more usually host—in particularly visible ways. It also suggests theatre as a multifarious and adaptive form, capable of distinguishing itself not only, and perhaps not even primarily, by its ephemerality, or the embodied co-presence of actor and performer, but rather by the specificity of the techniques and conventions that produce it.

Many other scholars have since scrutinized and interrogated the presumed opposition referenced by Auslander, offering new theories that illuminate complex relationships and interdependencies between performance, including theatrical performance, and media. In an especially illustrative example, the opening of Sarah Bay-Cheng’s essay “Theatre Is Media” paints a picture of even conventionally live theatre as inextricably imbricated with digital media—in particular, when she recounts her experience attending the Donmar Warehouse production of King Lear, starring Derek Jacobi, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) during its US tour. Bay-Cheng provides a comprehensive account of an encounter with a high-profile production of a deeply canonical work, a production that, despite its relatively traditional staging, “was largely activated by and within mediated networks,” in which the stage work itself comprised only a part of “an extended engagement with the play” (33). From the email newsletter by which she learned about the production, to online reviews of its run in London, to her own tweets and blog postings on the production in reflection, Bay-Cheng narrates a path through her experience of the production “unbounded by the duration of the performance in BAM’s Harvey Theater.” She argues persuasively that the live performance arguably at the center of that experience did not constitute “a privileged site of temporary encounter,” but rather “yet another form of mediated interaction” with its “text, contexts, and artifacts” (ibid.).

As she notes in passing, the production of King Lear, which Bay-Cheng demonstrates as so thoroughly enmeshed in mediated networks, was shown in cinemas in the United Kingdom, United States, and beyond as part of the NT Live series. NT Live, which premiered in 2009, adapted a model for simultaneous broadcast of work from the stage that was pioneered by the Metropolitan Opera in its Live in HD series, which debuted in 2006. Like the Met’s series, NT Live broadcasts temporally live video of staged performance to cinema screens as the production is happening—at least for audiences in the UK and parts of Western Europe.² In this essay, I examine how theatrical productions are mediatized via live broadcast and the strategies levied to maintain for the resulting mediatizations the name and status of theatre. While the broadcasts’ deployment of the rhetoric of liveness may appear to affirm the centrality of liveness to the theatre, the success their producers claim in removing theatre to the screen—producing “the theatre squared,” as Bay-Cheng puts it (2007, 37)—simultaneously implies otherwise, suggesting temporal liveness, evanescence, and co-presence between an audience and performers as less than necessary for an object that nonetheless aspires to...