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Technology at the National Theatre

Heather Neill describes how the National is meeting digital challenges in the twenty-first century

For some weeks now it has been possible to meet characters from Coram Boy in the Lyttelton foyer. Touch the screen in what used to be known informally as “the quiet area” – a place now buzzing with chatter and excitement – and Alexander or Meshak, Melissa or Mrs Lynch will come towards you bringing information about themselves and their role in the play. Alexander and the others inhabit the Big Wall, a giant interactive, infra-red screen, some three metres long and 1.125 high, which takes a player, at a touch, to moveable images and text on The Story, The People, The Times of Coram Boy and a virtual visit backstage. Popular options include seeing eighteenth-century toys in action, turning the “pages” of a Coram history, exploring Hogarth's London and “mixing” Handel's choral music, which underpins the Coram Boy story.

Young theatregoers and their attendant adults are among the first to take part in a major National Theatre experiment: the Big Wall is destined to develop and change over the next months until a number of people can collaborate in their investigations simultaneously. And, gradually, other plays will be treated in a similar way. But Coram Boy, with its vivid setting and swelling music, is a fine place to begin.

This is just one of the ways in which the National Theatre is using new technology, both to interact with its audience and as a flexible tool available to directors and designers. Executive Director Nick Starr says, “Technology is in the right place now. The software design is there, more and more people have broadband with moving pictures and delivery is free. Working with Accenture, a consultancy company who are sponsoring 'innovation at the National', has also allowed us to develop the technological side of new productions".

The National has far-reaching plans for improving the video-recording of productions and making them available through its archive, which will be housed in the refurbished National Theatre Studio, scheduled to reopen in autumn 2007. As Starr says, “Theatre people used to see an implicit threat in the representation of what they do on screen. But that's a dead issue. The screen image is nothing like being in a theatre; it is not replacing anything but reinforcing and deepening the experience.”

And as audiences are discovering more about what happens behind the scenes, similarly innovative technologies are becoming familiar tools for directors and designers.

While the core technologies used for the Big Wall were invented and developed by Accenture, the creative input and development for the NT were achieved by two in-house graphic designers and a digital projects producer who worked concentratedly on it for weeks. For Nick Starr, the important thing is that developments are happening in-house rather than being bought in. “It's important that the NT is nurturing such people”, he says. It means that change can be embraced quickly and that specialists can be available to all departments as required. The work also galvanised a diverse group of people from other departments who all contributed and have all learnt something new from the experience.

Big Wall is, in a sense, a website writ, literally, large. And websites have featured in the NT's communications arsenal for quite some time. The imaginative educational site, stagework.org, which takes viewers into the previously closed world of the rehearsal room, has already won a number of awards, including two BAFTAs. In the latest addition to the site, Ian McKellen as Richard III appears in a BT-sponsored interactive video, answering pre-determined questions. Visitors to this section of stagework can also play a game putting together the hunchback's “Now is the winter of our discontent” speech interactively. The main NT website, to which people go for information and to book tickets, is also changing. Jonathan Crenner from Accenture has instigated several “quick win” developments this year, adding more mobile, more dynamic elements to the previously text-based information. There are now, for instance, filmed trailers of productions in which directors are becoming involved, producing clips specifically for the purpose. And alongside this, there is a new service: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds topical information, such as the availability of a discount or the introduction of the Big Wall itself, to potential theatregoers. Crenner says, “The home pages of websites often have a 'burning news' section. Normally you have to go to the site to access it; this comes to you.” Subscribers sign up and are instantly in the loop. Podcasting is a parallel service. Platform events – interviews with actors and directors, for instance – can be downloaded free. These innovations will be built on gradually, beginning with an overhaul of the website next year after which information will be more clearly displayed and theatregoers will be able to book a particular seat online.

]See the first stage of the website overhaul with discover , launched in August 2008 to present the work of the expanded education department, now renamed Discover. This new website features discover: Online taking you on tours behind the scenes at the National and taking the work of Stagework on to the next level.]

When they arrive at the theatre, those theatregoers will soon have even more to entertain them before the play begins, or indeed whenever the building is open. Screens in the foyers will show clips from the National Theatre archive – Measure for Measure, perhaps, or My Fair Lady – drawing attention to its greater accessibility. Productions have been captured on video since the mid-90s, mainly for research purposes, using a single camera. The NT's archivist, Gavin Clarke, is in the process of digitising the backlog. Nowadays productions are recorded in a more sophisticated way, using several cameras and with the facility for close-up, while retaining the fixed camera image for academic purposes. Members of the public will be able to visit the NT archive at the refurbished Studio and request a viewing of a particular production, either for study in private, where they might isolate certain scenes or performances, or in a mini-cinema which will seat 30 people – a class of students, perhaps.

As for new technology becoming part of stage language, Starr is determined that this should be director and designer-led. He fears that innovation might be stifled by “the dead hand of the institution” if a department were set up to offer specific resources for performance. Instead directors such as Katie Mitchell (for Waves , Attempts on her Life and ...some trace of her ) and Sean Holmes (for The Caucasian Chalk Circle ) have chosen to collaborate with young, go-ahead groups expert in video and film art while the NT provides appropriate support. Four or five other directors will be experimenting in similar ways in the next year or two.

Katie Mitchell, designer Vicki Mortimer and lighting designer Paule Constable worked with Leo Warner of Fifty-Nine Ltd to bring the essence of Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness novel to the stage, one of the productions sponsored by Accenture. The result is a mixture of theatricality and technology as unexpected and often beautiful images appear simultaneously on stage (where the means of producing them are not concealed) and on screen. An actor, for instance, may quickly don one sleeve, as that is all that is seen of his costume on screen. Actors, while concentrating on character in the normal way, took what amounted to a crash course in producing sound and filmic effects to achieve an extraordinary fluidity. Warner says: “Once they got the right kit and basic training, it leapt into another dimension”. There are four cameras on stage and multiple overlapping projectors. Everything is live, except for the recurring image of breaking waves.

Meanwhile Sean Holmes is working with Filter, a company of actors and musicians who specialise in theatrical problem-solving using everything from bits of string to computers, video cameras and contact mics. The latter is a mic which is strapped to a chair but picks up and amplifies only the vibrations in its immediate vicinity. A musician – Tom Haines in this case – might improvise realistic-sounding galloping horses simply by drumming with his fingers. Brecht's play provides just the kind of challenges Filter enjoys, as does installation artist Lorna Heavey who is working alongside them. Heavey might be found in the rehearsal room directing a spy camera at a part of a doll's hand and projecting it on screen to represent the disputed child Michael. Or she might be filming some string leading from a model forest to represent a swaying bridge, while an actor completes the effect by clinging to a rope. These ideas were just some of the many tried out on one particular experimental afternoon.

Theatre can be made in a bare space where one person simply speaks to another. It has traditionally been an ephemeral art, but it has always been experimental. Shakespeare's actors employing a real cannon in Henry VIII, the Victorians lighting music hall with gas lamps, and modern directors with their magic box of spy cameras, projectors and computer programmes – all these are simply making the best use of materials available to enhance their art. It is still ephemeral as an experience, but from now on it will be possible to glimpse that experience with some degree of accuracy in perpetuity. As Nick Starr says, “It's pleasurable to be curious,” and the National is taking the latest opportunities seriously because, “It's more enjoyable to be in the swim than chasing the wave”.


© Heather Neill, January 2007
Heather Neill is a freelance journalist and theatre writer