Let's stop pretending that theatre can't be captured on screen
"I recall a Punch cartoon of the late 1950s showing two moviegoers gazing in astonishment at the latest 3D spectacle. 'Next thing,' one of them remarked, 'they'll be having real people up there.' But we are now in an era when the gap between film and theatre, thanks to sophisticated technology, is constantly narrowing. I went this week to a preview of Digital Theatre's screen version of Richard Eyre's Almeida production of Ibsen's Ghosts: I can only say that it offered an experience comparable to that I had in the theatre. I'd also recommend everyone to see it when it's shown in 200 cinemas across the UK and Ireland on 26 June.
It's not quite the same as National Theatre Live, where cinemagoers vicariously attend a single performance. Digital's Ghosts, I'm told, was shot over three successive evenings during the show's run at the Trafalgar Studios. But, whatever the process, the result is to democratise theatre. It's not just that the performance can be seen worldwide. The key point is that everyone now has the best seat in the house."
(Michael Billington, 18 June 2014)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Aesthetic Movement: Art for Arts Sake
Exhibition: The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement is at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London SW7 from 2 April to 17 July 2011.
"The movement started in a small way in the 1860s in the studios and houses of a radical group of artists and designers, including William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. These were angry young reformers who explored new ways of living in defiance of the horrendous design standards of the age as revealed in the 1851 Great Exhibition.
Over the next two decades aestheticism burgeoned, drawing in architects and craftworkers, poets, critics and philosophers to create a movement dedicated to pure beauty. The aesthetic movement stood in stark and sometimes shocking contrast to the crass materialism of Britain in the 19th century. "Art for art's sake" was its battle cry, a slogan that originated with the French poet Théophile Gautier."
(Fiona MacCarthy, 26 March 2011, The Guardian)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
