Screened Theatre: a 'mirror up to Nature', or symptomatic of media misdirection?
As part of the National Theatre’s 50th anniversary celebrations, the 2010 National Theatre Live broadcast of Hamlet, in which Rory Kinnear played the young Dane, returned this week to cinemas across the UK. A total sell-out on its first circuit, this modern-dress performance, with its thematic attention on the topical rub of media misdirection, state surveillance and espionage, particularly suits a celluloid reincarnation. Indeed, Horatio’s premonitory remark at the appearance of Hamlet Senior’s vengeful ghost—‘This bodes some strange eruption to our state’—has never more tellingly punned on ‘state’.
Despite being largely derivative of Gregory Doran’s 2009 filmic adaptation of Hamlet, in which Elsinore became a prison of mirrors and secret governmental supervision--equipped with CCTV, a disquietingly bleak and detached perspective for the audience--this performance holds its own by replacing CCTV with eavesdropping security guards and by shifting the focus of examination to the façades of media coverage—Claudius’ inaugural monologue to register his brother’s regretful (ha!) death, for instance, is filmed by an on-stage camera crew as a message to the unsuspecting public of Denmark. He might as well have started, 'My fellow Danes...'
As in Doran’s adaptation, the filmic aspects offered to audiences of this production—that is, its being filmed and appearing on-screen—constitute an interesting thematic scheme. If, for instance, as Peter L. McNamara posits, ‘theatre eradicates the psychological boundary between art and life and achieves the communion of actor and viewer, [and] it persuades man to study experience in its mimetic mirror,’ then, perhaps, the cinematic experience reconstructs (or, at least, accommodates) this boundary with the intermediary camera lens, thus engendering a mirroring process which functions outside and distant to the actual occasion of performance, that is, independently of the conventional theatrical experience. In short, by resituating the viewed experience to a recorded-live (rather than simply live) interaction, phenomenological tension is generated.
But, aside from thematic intrigue, does this have a detrimental effect on the performance itself? In many respects, I would argue: yes. It is true that recorded theatre has extraordinary potential, not least in the fact that, I imagine, the public will be more inclined to pay £10 to go to the cinema than to pay up to six-times that to attend the theatre, and consequently more theatre will be watched--always a good thing. But—and here’s my concern—with recorded theatre, the multiplicity of audience perspective is radically limited. Instead of the viewer being afforded the choice of perspective, and thus, interpretation, this is surrendered to the director himself. In short, we see only what the camera allows us to see, and thus can interpret only what is offered for interpretation. There were many times in this production in which the total impact of a scene was constrained to a close-up on one character. Where the live-theatre audience member can witness secondary stage directions and reacting characters’ behaviour to inform their interpretation of a scene, those in the cinema are often presented with the facial expression one character alone. In short, the myriad of observable facets which constitute live performance are drastically reduced, and likewise the possibility for various, discreet interpretations.
For all its criticism of media misdirection, then, the recorded-live form functions to cap possible truths the play itself could offer. The power of observation is conferred to those with control of perspective. Of course, the list of instances in which media coverage has engendered particular, motivated perspectives is endless, but in light of recent distortions of truth, apropos the UK Leader of the Opposition Ed Miliband’s late father, who, according to Miliband, was unjustly portrayed by the Daily Mail as unpatriotic), the rise of screened theatre should be held from an analogously guarded standpoint. Perhaps, then, we should revise the cautionary phrase, ‘Don’t believe everything you read’; perhaps it should be, ‘Don’t believe everything you see—or, for that matter, don't overlook everything we aren’t allowed to see.’
Nathaniel Ogle, VOIX Culture Editor.
Based in Manchester.
Photo taken from Hamlet trailer, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16vp4IBv5WQ