Making theatre more accessible. Sort of.

J. Kelly Nestruck posted this in his Globe & Mail blog this morning. It reminded me that I did, indeed, read about it earlier this week. I just never got around to blogging about it.

The National Theatre in London is planning to broadcast several of its productions live in movie theatres throughout the UK, making the theatre more accessible to those outside of London. Tickets at the movies will be about £10 (which is about what it costs to see certain shows at the National itself). In order to recoup the costs of this broadcast, they are also proposing to sell them for broadcast abroad. The first production in this series, which will be called NT Live, is Racine's Phèdre starring Helen Mirren (!!!!!).

This project takes its cue from a few places, not the least of which is our own Stratford Festival's filming of Ceasar and Cleopatra starring Christopher Plummer. It will be shown in select Cineplex theatres throughout Canada on January 31.

While the filming of theatre is not really anything new, what is interesting to me about the National's project is that they plan to broadcast the show live--no edits--so the audience in the movie theatre will see the same show as the audience in the theatre. More or less. There are still things lost in translation from one medium to the other...but this is sort of an in between mediums idea, isn't it?

Will we see more of this in the future? I guess it depends on how these runs go...I think I will reserve judgment until I have actually seen one of these play-movies.