Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves... The movie used many locations to make up the world of ancient Nottinghamshire. Photograph: Kobal
Richard Schechner once beautifully described theatre as "the last of the handmade arts". I like that idea. That after all the rotating stages, the fireworks, the deafening soundscapes and the multi-million pound reimaginings of fantasy worlds, theatre is still one person doing something, being watched by someone else. I like that theatre can happen in a power cut. I like that, despite any protestations to the contrary, things haven't progressed much since burly medieval guildsmen performed the betrayal in the garden on the back of a wooden cart juddering through the streets of York or Wakefield. In some ways they might have gone backwards.
I also, however, like technology. I like the things that technology allows us to do in the theatre. But I worry that theatre uses technology in all the wrong ways.
The wonderful thing about film is the power of editing. Editing means that film happens in a world that is everywhere and nowhere at once. Whether it is a collage of locations inventing a past world like the castles of northern France and Hadrian's wall and the forests of Yorkshire that make up the ancient Nottingham of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, or the entirely fictional blue-screen landscapes of Sin City or Beowulf, or even simply cutting between two people appearing to have a conversation who were never actually in the same room, Cinema always happens in an invented world; a wonderful, infinite, impossible world we can never be a part of.
This is, of course, the very opposite of theatre. Theatre is so exciting because it is always happening somewhere real, whether it's an auditorium or a railway station or an underground vault. It is always happening right now. We are always a part of it. The giddy excitement of theatre is in seeing these people right in front of your eyes, seeing them breathing and sweating, knowing that something could go wrong, knowing that you could stand up and shout and they would hear you. Theatre is about knowing that you are a part of something that is happening right now and will never happen again.
Too often however, when theatre becomes enslaved to technology, when it lusts after the spectacle of film, it loses that intimacy and that immediacy (what is now almost always referred to as liveness) that makes it so special.
Take, for example, Complicite's recent A Disappearing Number at The Barbican. The critics almost universally marvelled at its beauty, at the way in which places and times fizzed in and out of existence, telescoping Cambridge, Delhi, and a locked lecture theatre into the same moment; showing how they were connected, how each was a part of a spiritual, almost predetermined destiny, how they are all the same thing. And with its dizzying myriad projections on projections the show no doubt achieved that cinematic spectacle, existing in some other universe; a rhythmic, perfect non-place. But for me, in all this beauty, something was lost. Something very important.
Speaking through microphones and reacting to the constantly shifting projections appearing and disappearing behind them, the actors were dislocated from their audience. They were no longer live beings, performing and reacting to a given audience on a given night. They were cogs in a vast and beautifully realised digital spectacle. Here there was little room for anything to go wrong, for anything unplanned to happen, for the actors to taste the reaction of the audience and respond to it. As director Chris Goode has said before when referring to the vast technological system on which so much theatre feeds: "The assumption this whole system is built on is that the ideal is for each performance to resemble the last as exactly as possible". This is a theatre whose liveness is draining away, leaving it ghostly and distant.
This doesn't have to be the case when theatre-makers borrow the tools of cinema. In fact, something incredible can happen. Look at Katie Mitchell's Attempts on Her Life, where the messy, immediate liveness of the actors was juxtaposed with the startlingly complex cinematic stories they were telling at the same time. There were the actors on stage, pouring out sand, making decisions, not reacting to the film but to the audience. But you could also see them on film, edited together live with things happening in other parts of the stage to create an impossibly distant, other world; the actors existing in two places at once. As these two worlds collided, the infinite, distant world of the cinema and the real, live, in-the-room world of the theatre, something complex and beautiful was created. Something handmade and breathtaking. And that's the kind of technology theatre should be borrowing.
