Opinion: All The World’s A Stage – Is film becoming the new theatre?

Today, the film industry is one of the largest grossing cultural dragons to exist, propping up economies and spreading stories across the world. It’s a rapidly growing cornerstone of culture, creativity and art – but is it one that pushes theatre out of the spotlight?

Looking at the statistics, it’s a good question to ask – don’t worry, there’s not going to be many after this, but it’s worth a look in. Last year saw our planet fork out over 38 billion dollars on tickets – and by 2020, it’s estimated that we’ll be pouring just shy of 50 billion dollars into the big screen, enough to fund the NHS for 5 months with pocket change to spare. And this is just from tickets alone, never mind merchandise, DVD’s, the piracy industry or tourism income as a result. With all the recordable income of films totalled up, it’s easy to see the allure of filmmaking for lining one’s wallets. Last year, the highest grossing film was Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, who’s gross profits just nosed above the 1 billion dollar mark worldwide on all their assets. Taking off their spending costs – a meagre 200 million – and parties involved are left with a tidy sum of 912 million dollars profit to treat the kids with. Moving down the list, these numbers don’t really drop off too significantly – the second and third largest films of that year, Jungle Book and Moana, took home a net profit of $833 million and $577 million respectively. Even Kubo and the Two Strings, a spirited animation that landed 68th on the list, came out with $28 million of profit in pocket after release.

But of course, income is only a conclusion, if you will – it’s the cultural equivalent of licking one’s lips at dinner and asking for more. It concludes that film is a success, not just as a bank-filler, but as something people love. It’s joined the ranks of other art mediums, and it’s done so in style, crashing down the doors and striding in with broad Hollywood arrogance in its gait, the rickshaw cliques of society trailing faithfully in its wake. But is there a fear that the table is too crowded? Cutting the metaphors aside, could film be asserting itself as an upgraded theatre – the traditional moving spectacle of the art world – or is there still a niche for the stage which can’t be touched by the big screen?

The best way to answer this, I feel, is to approach the two from different angles. Rather than take theatre on the merits of film, you should instead compare those with the merits of stage and live performance. So, to do that, let’s look at what the merits of film are. What is it that makes a good film, and how is that evaluation different when you wax lyrical about good theatre?

Making a film is traditionally a vast project, even when you adjust the sliders on its scope. From the Hollywood blockbuster to the minimalist art film, the school project video to the hand drawn animation – they all sit on spinning plates, balancing their departments and features in different ways to fit the film’s template. The same goes for practically all art, really – the photographer Fay Godwin’s work is driven by opinion, turning the lens on human intrusion on the British landscape. She uses landscape shots to suggest vastness and imposing power, medium shots to suggest intimacy within this, black and white filters to highlight expression, hard light and the sharp contours of her rocky subject matter to add depth and textural contrast. All of the techniques of photography, from guiding lines, depth of field, internal framing, the rule of thirds, textural and tonal contrast, are employed and managed in subtle ways with the vision of what she wants to purvey – a gorgeous, brooding landscape that’s inescapably marked by human action in a failed attempt to control it. But then, you can turn your attention to the photography of Slinkachu, who shoots miniature scenes of everyday life and topical events, such as a banana peel refugee tent, a shoelace loch ness monster or a melting ice lolly swimming pool with a lolly stick diving board. He uses the same basic techniques as Godwin, but in such a different style that the effect is entirely different. And this carries across all forms of art – literature, painting, music, dance, theatre and film. There are underlying ‘rules’ of a sort, be it music theory, sentence structure, stress rhythms or painting techniques, that determine the strengths of the genre and its effects. And these rules can then be used as perfectly as Titian, or as loosely as Tchaikovsky, to create any number of desired effects.

In film, the technology available is a large part of the rules and tools of the trade . It is both limited and expanded by access to cameras, radio mics, booms, monitors, green screens, wolly dollies, jibs, tripods and editing software. And using them well is about as vital to film as the lungs are to the person making it – cameras, for instance, play the role as visual perspective, and are incredibly versatile at giving character to a film when used appropriately. Long and slow shots create tense, mounting scenes in ‘Birdman’, and add to the engulfing energy of Jordan Belfort’s business headquarters in ‘Wolf of Wall Street’. Close and intimate cinematography in ‘Whiplash’ and ‘Locke’ add to the claustrophobia of both films and the stress inherent to their environment, whilst similar close-up shots are used quickly and directly to create movement and freedom in the recently released ‘Baby Driver’. Wide camera settings in Quentin Tarentino’s ‘The Hateful 8’ creates a stretched interior and the paranoia of a stand-off, whilst the square setting in the Hungarian film ‘Son of Saul’ centres entirely on the face of its protagonist and on his reactions to the hellish world in which he has come to live, creating a violent yet very human tone to what is a beautifully harrowing film. Essentially, whilst the camera is your bread and butter as a film maker, it still comes with a whole spice rack of flavour.

And of course, the camera is only the windscreen on a far larger vehicle – for music and the soundtrack itself rattles in the engine and tweets off the radio; even when sound is entirely absent in ‘The Artist’, it’s a very present part of the production all the same. It’s tense and uncertain in ‘Interstellar’, beautiful and tragic in ‘Moonlight’ and characteristically off the wall in ‘Frank’. And if we cut aside the camera altogether, there are other ways to present funky visuals. Animation can add appeal to children, bring a new layer of style, add surrealism and celebrate cultural film making, all with its own field of variety – be it the clean-cut Disney with its highly saturated and pristine style, the wonky yet dynamic clay models in ‘Wallace and Gromit’ and ‘James and the Giant Peach’, or even the stich-work models of ‘Coraline’ and ‘9’. Film has a huge shiny toolkit up its sleeves, which can be sprinkled, poured or pounded into a movie with the brains or brawn of its user.

And this variety lets a filmmaker weave to the nth degree, touching up here with this and there with that, until it’s a perfect tapestry that wraps its world about you. It doesn’t matter what the film is; whatever the story, whatever the angle, whatever the tone or the filter or the CGI or the camera setting. Films thrive, with or without any of these, because they are superb at immersion. That’s the key to cinema’s success – done well, it can draw you in to whatever vision it has and hold you down till the end. Now sometimes, that vision isn’t going to be something you want to be immersed in – I’m not sure how many times the earth needs to be threatened by a one-eyed villain or vague alien republic before the novelty wears off, or if there’s such a thing as too many films about an OAP and his flying house. But whatever your opinion on a good film is, it’s likely that a film that doesn’t immerse you, or at the very least capture your interest in the film’s message and style, is a film that won’t make any top 10 lists.

A film makes you believe in the cause of Martin Luther King in ‘Selma’, because he’s there with thousands of people making the march, delivering the speeches and facing the difficulties in a pseudo-reality before you. It makes you terrified for Jack and his mother in ‘Room’, and places you in the hands and mind of Heather Donahue in the truly terrifying psychological horror film ‘The Blaire Witch Project’. It summons historical footage to build evidence and exposition in the outstanding and devastating documentary ‘I’m Not Your Negro’, which pieces together the work of social critic and black rights activist James Baldwin throughout the mid-20th century. And then, you have a film like ‘Swiss Army Man’ starring Daniel Radcliffe in a list-topping role as ‘flatulent corpse’, which takes a ridiculous subject matter – that of a stranded man and his deceased companion – and still immerses you in the believable relationship that the two develop, and the near-psychedelic sequences that it sets to minimalist music. As Mr. Anthony Minghella, the director responsible for the Oscar-winning film ‘The English Patient’ wrote: “We can momentarily be a young woman, an old woman, a black person, an Asian person, a Chinese person, and look at the world and argue a position that is not our own for a while — inhabit a position that is not our own.” It’s a power of cinema which theatre never quite achieves in the same way.

Another thing that theatre can’t match up to is accessibility. As I mentioned, Cinema has a plethora of departments – but not all of them are necessary, and not all of them need be on as grand a scale as a Hollywood blockbuster. One of the weaknesses to theatre, and it is one that cripples it in the international department, is that it requires a stage, and is then limited to that stage for the performance. Film, however, isn’t grounded in one place at a time – it’s not even limited to the cinema. Films from the big screen can be enjoyed at varying definitions from home, on the plane, in a car or online; so that old man can float his house on a screen larger than a bus, or smaller than your hand. And the internet platform is one that a budget filmmaker has crucial access to; one that a playwright can only look at with envy and longing.

You need only look to YouTube to see the benefits that the world wide web has had. The variety and depth of films made for free viewing, and the tremendous response they’ve received is absolutely staggering. A short film which, granted, could do with a better title than ‘Imagine a world where being ‘Gay’ the norm and being ‘Straight’ would be the minority!’ still manages to look at a difficult subject matter with a surprising degree of professionalism and style, and attract the attention of 22 million viewers on YouTube. Art students, presumably looking to escape the bowls of creative hell they work from (I speak from experience here) have turned their hand to the internet film industry too, with the animated shorts ‘Blackwater Gospel’ and ‘Paths of Hate’ receiving 2.5 million and 3.9 million views respectively at the time of writing. And they, too, have the style, the character, the immersion of a film you might find in cinema. They share a similar thick-lined comic art style, and both employ a limited use of language, to create a comparable yet very different theme. YouTube is a breeding ground for talent, and an easily accessible forum to enjoy it in, demonstrating just how far ranging the influence of film is and dropping a step ladder down for those that want to take part. And having such ease of access puts pressure on the big screen to listen to their audiences; the accessibility online democratizes film, allowing the public push and pull of opinions to affect the nature of the aesthetic. So sure, it’s a cultural dragon; but it’s still one that comes with stabilisers and a microphone if you’re learning to fly it.

And that microphone is as much a translator as it is a loudspeaker. The impact on culture and its globalisation that film has had is, to put it mildly, a matter of controversy depending on who you speak to. Without ratcheting the spotlight onto the guilty, the Americanisation of cultures by cinema can be weighed to be nothing more than exploitation, as the Caucasian, patriarchal fantasies of our pocket of the world are spluttered out to all corners of the globe; and all corners of the globe are sucked back into that Caucasian, patriarchal fantasy to top up sales figures – a great big stereotyped cooking pot with lots of servings but an ironic lack of substance or taste. But the western film soufflé is a discussion for another time – the real nugget of importance here is the access that film still brings to culture. Now, when I talk about cultural films, I’m not talking about those films that really have a Hollywood watermark imprinted in the corner, a westerner in sheep’s clothing if you will. I mean real films made by and for the country of origin, or at least in an honest representation of it by those with more tact and insight than would exploit it. Films like the masterful ‘Embrace of the Serpent’, which runs two stories alongside each other within the Columbian rainforest during the rubber trade of the early 1900’s. It’s a film that ensnares the viewer in the experiences of its most central character, Karamakate, in two separate episodes of his life – both of which involve his dealings with western explorers with different intentions, and which shape him as a person. It’s a film steeped in mythos, personality, and above all a humble respect for the cultures it portrays. The viewer is sat in judgement of these intruders, rather than on the shoulder of some heroic Hollywood conqueror, and it allows the important story and history of these increasingly fragile parts of the world to exist with dignity to a viewer watching in metropolis London. As the film critic Mark Kermode explains in his review for BBC Radio 5, it doesn’t “do that ‘exoticising’ thing of using the jungle as a subset of a North American-European experience.” The reason I’m stressing this so much is because I truly believe that film does have a place in the spreading of culture, which can be eye opening and wonderful as long as it’s treated with care and respect, whilst theatre simply struggles on such a localised platform. The creation of film away from the budgets and populism of America and the west have truly expanded and brought to life the stories of people and struggles which, up until now, hasn’t had the voice to be heard amongst the footfall of bankers as they charge with laden cases from set to set. Films like ‘The Other Side of Hope’, a dark comedy which follows the story of a Syrian refugee attempting to start a new life in Finland amidst racism and boarder control, brings humour and life to a tale which most of us only know through news reports and internet articles; or ‘Frida’, which follows the title character in 1930s Mexico where a painter’s work can be made irrelevant by the beliefs of the hand behind the brush. Film is the ultimate storyteller, and whether that story be as distant as the New Zealand wilderness in the intelligent and hilarious ‘The Hunt for the Wilderpeople’ or as close to home as ‘Trainspotting’ (which needs no introduction), those stories transcend language and culture with an ease that the stage just cannot do.

Which leads us neatly into cinema’s predecessor; the theatre. It has a reputation for being a middle-class, even elitist, art form, and it’s very easy to see why. Whilst you may struggle to find a snuff box in theatres these days, and in truth there’s more in the hearts and mouths of its fans than silver spoons, it’s difficult to find an appeal for the wider audience. Showings are private and exclusive, booking can be expensive and often difficult, and the notion that theatre’s subject matter is stuck in the past is one that shadows a lot of the more contemporary productions in suspicion. It’s a difficult industry to break into as a writer or director, lacking a global platform or much by way of ‘self-publishing’ unless you have a pop-up stage in your pocket. And translating a live performance is a clunky and ham-fisted process if it’s even used, whilst accessibility for the deaf or hearing impaired is limited to caption performances. It’s fair to say that, whilst film thrives from its accessibility to all ages, cultures and financial backgrounds, theatre falls pitifully short of appealing to so wide an audience.

However, there are ways in which this shortcoming is seeing improvements. The most noteworthy of these is the introduction of filmed theatre, such as NT Live screenings in cinemas around the UK or the Digital Theatre internet platform. It’s an example of theatre using the benefits of cinema, and adopting them as its own. But, in doing this, it also exposes what makes theatre so special and potent, because of what it lacks when it comes to the screen.

The big problems that filmed theatre productions have, for all that they gain in audience, are evident in this assimilation. They don’t have the grand soundtracks, the subtle filters or the landscapes of films. There’s no post-edit magic to be worked, special effects are often sketchy in realism and camera shots can seem crude or flat when compared to the meticulous detail of cinema and the photographic rules it uses. Seeing theatre in a cinema can make you wonder ‘Why am I watching this, when I could be watching a film?’

But here is why something I wrote at the very top of this article is so important – “rather than take theatre on the merits of film, you should instead compare those with the merits of stage and live performance.” Because judging theatre on what it doesn’t do as well as cinema assumes that theatre is ‘the old’, and film is ‘the new’. But that’s about as relevant as comparing lemons to lemmings, or damming a gourmet steak because it isn’t as sweet as a sorbet. It’s little wonder that 2D theatre is an awkward hybrid rather than a clean improvement, much as it should come as no surprise that a slamming keyboard solo wouldn’t fit a baroque quartet suite. The reality is that film and theatre are very different beasts, and they approach the subjects of story in very different ways.

You only need look at the sheer variety of theatre throughout the ages and cultures of the world to get a sense of the approaches it takes. You may find a more traditional style in ancient Greek plays, such as Medea or Bacchus, where morals and vice often play a key role. Human characters are defined by their arrogance or self-indulgence, leading them inextricably to be knocked aside by the gods – powerful beings with humanistic vices of their own, who ultimately demand respect. Aristocracy abounds, as do prophecies and those that ignore or overcompensate from them, and the themes of comedy and tragedy are the commonly accepted bases from which to work off. And throughout all of this, the chorus comment, sing and dance at intervals in a grand form of exposition to the semi-circular auditorium audience. But then you can travel south, where African ritual dance is a core aspect of belief and storytelling even today, ranging vastly across sub-Saharan Africa with the diversity of cultures that exist there. Dancers don a beautiful array of masks, which are often sculpted into the features of animal heads representing the spirits of the natural world about them, or as figures of importance in popular mythos and history. When a dancer wears such a mask, be it one depicting a beast, a spirit, the dead or the living, their characteristics are channelled into the dancer in far more depth than a mere act. It is believed in many cultures that the actor communes with the character they portray, to such an extent that they act as a vessel for this character to manifest into. Performances are therefore charged with energy and music, a wide variety of percussion instruments and vocals accompanying a rich and colourful story that invades the audience. Theatre, then, whilst it doesn’t quite manage to stay as on top of current events as cinema, is still just as capable at telling cultural stories. And its success throughout history and geography begs the question; what makes it so appealing?

The answer? Energy. And I don’t mean some conceptual washy ‘energy’, I mean the kind of energy that exists between a live event and its audience. You could watch videos of mask dances, just as you could watch a first-person perspective of a rollercoaster ride or a hurricane tearing at the beaches in some far-flung resort, but there’s no energy to it. For all the immersion that film can do, it’s still limited to the screen on which it’s played and the four walls of the room it plays to. Whereas theatre is akin to standing beneath a thundering fireworks show, film is little more than a recording of it. That’s the strength of theatre, and it’s why it loses so much when it becomes a recorded event – in taking on the access power of film, it loses the most powerful quality that it has.

The energy of theatre has consequences on its production, and its reception. Productions aren’t built to be poised or careful like film, but to be a performance – a dynamic thing that focuses as much on the telling of the story as the story itself. Good theatre is constantly self-referencing, pointing to the fact that it’s an interpretation rather than a literal event. It doesn’t try to trick the audience into an immersive world, but builds through metaphor and devices a framework with which an observer can create everything else. Much like a book, it trusts the imagination rather than just the senses to bring an audience into the fold – we have to use our ‘critical consciousness’, as Tony Kushner says. The writer behind the phenomenal Angels in America points to the dynamic nature of theatre as its strength, and it’s ‘poverty of means’ in comparison to the array of film as a strange advantage. ‘There’s a great power in theatre’s inability to create a complete illusion’, he explains. The fact that theatre cannot just present a literal explanation of events forces, and allows it, to be creative without the fear of being ‘unrealistic’ or abstract to the point of incredulity. Shakespeare’s original performances of King Lear featured cannons, which boomed dramatically as Lear tore himself apart beneath the roiling black clouds above. Cannons reappear in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture at its peak, rumbling with the fanfare power of the piece – they aren’t simply to add sound, but to add spectacle. One of the most fantastic examples I’ve heard of such spectacle can be found in the original 1898 performance of ‘Ben Hur’, in which live horse-drawn chariots ran full pelt on the stage, whilst beneath them a grand treadmill operated with wheels and pulleys in full view of the audience to keep them in place. And yet, the spectacle of theatre can be in the small things – tipping a room so its floor becomes the back wall in ‘Metamorphosis’, gradually flooding the stage to hint at Ophelia’s pressing fate in ‘Ophelias Zimmer’, burying a character to the neck in Becket’s ‘Happy Days’ to represent nihilism and the inconsequential nature of our lives. It could be in the performances themselves – another Becket play, the dry satire ‘Waiting for Godot’, uses our fixed perspective within the audience to its advantage by stretching scenes and playing with the awkward silences that this brings, before introducing Pozzo as a lavish, dominating presence on stage that briefly absorbs this silence before leaving it again. A similar contrast is used in Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’, which follows the two minor characters between their scenes in Hamlet, as they wait for things to happen. The live nature of the performances gives it a scope beyond the literal, allowing it to address very little story or progression with a great deal of character and style. Whilst film may look more at the literal of its story, theatre has a way of commenting beyond just that – it lets us see the inner workings, and invest ourselves in the story through ‘critical consciousness’ rather than immersive trickery. As Kushner goes on to say, ‘What theatre does is create a laboratory in which people have a direct experience of being able to believe and disbelieve at the same time and to watch something and to get what its supposed to be and what its made to be on its surface and also to read it at the same time – to dig below the surface and interpret.’

As an audience, then, we are as much a part of a play as the actors, in a way. We’re the laughs that stimulate comedy, the ears that receive a monologue and the trembling group from which the magician draws an awkward participant onto stage. We’re the space that comedian Stewart Lee will often navigate in an off-mic tirade of satirical hatred, we rattle with the percussion of the ‘Blue Man Group’ and hover above our seats as Hathorne hammers death sentences in ‘The Crucible’. Our presence is just as important for a production as a production’s presence is for us. Andrew Russel, the producing art director for the tony-award winning Intiman theatre, finds his interests in theatre as being “that the actors toss that [climactic moments of a play] to the audience and say “Catch. What are you going to do with this? This which we have given you? After all, you can’t unsee it.” For him, the audience creates a ‘public now’ amongst themselves, a communal sense of anticipation which makes theatre what it is, and separates it from film entirely. It’s a space where the action can indeed be caught, the energy tasted, and thrown back at the stage in answer.

So yes, we can look at film as a successful business and art form. Those statistics at the start of this article still speak volumes, and the strengths of film are a prominent and brilliant addition to storytelling in a modern and accessible setting. But as I’ve asserted throughout, we can’t simply throw the measurements of the big screen onto the big stage and expect them to match up. The potential of theatre is in its spectacle, its energy and its failure to create a perfect illusion. It’s as important to appreciate it as a construction as it is a story; as much as brushstrokes make a painting, so do the visible ropes and pulleys of theatre make the performance. And in a world where we demand an increasing level of realism in our digital art, the importance of its contrast in theatre is, if anything, more real than ever.