What kind of TV event would get you out of bed early—a General Election, the Oscars, the Olympics? For me, many years ago, it was an opera. At 6am one Sunday morning in 1992 I was huddled before the TV in pyjamas and dressing gown to experience a live relay of the last act of Puccini’s ‘Tosca’. This was, however, no ordinary relay. The producer had had the bold idea of staging the opera in the three actual Roman locations in which it is set (all largely unchanged since 1800, the period of the opera), and, even more ambitiously, at the times of day at which the action was supposed to happen: noon, evening—and dawn.

Even at the time my inner cynic wondered if this was all a huge scam, and the whole thing had been pre-recorded, but in a recent TV film the great tenor Placido Domingo talked about the nerve-wracking process of coping with the complex technology while performing to a global audience numbered in the hundreds of millions. And I saw again the scene that was burned on my memory: Domingo, as the doomed Cavaradossi, stepping out on to the roof of the Castel San Angelo in the pearly morning light, the dome of St Peter’s behind him, and beginning to sing his last great aria, ‘E lucevan le stelle…’. Pure magic.

A few years later I was taking part in a planning session organised by the Scottish Arts Council to envision what the arts would look like in the coming new millennium. Partly inspired by my ‘Tosca’ experience, I was one of a bolshie group who argued that in the future there would be fewer performances, but that, thanks to emerging digital technology, each performance would be ‘experienced’ by many more people, and that this use of digital relays would become a major source of income for orchestras, opera and ballet companies, and theatres. The old guard dismissed this scathingly—nothing, of course, could replace the frisson of actually being there! How wrong they were.

It began, not surprisingly, with the Metropolitan Opera of New York, which had, many decades previously, pioneered live radio broadcasts of its productions, and subsequently taken up the opportunity of satellite technology to send those broadcasts round the world. Now the Met relays these live performances to cinemas in 40 countries to be screened in High Definition video. This has proved enormously successful. Performances at the Cameo cinema in Edinburgh regularly sell out despite a ticket price of £25. Champagne, I believe, is consumed.

Now, you could argue that opera, being larger than life, is made for the big screen. After all, there have been opera films as long as there has been cinema (yes, even silent ones!), and nowadays most opera recordings are made as DVDs, rather than audio-only CDs. But it now appears that this system works equally well for ‘straight’ theatre.

Last year the National Theatre in London launched ‘NT Live’, adopting the Met model and sending live relays of stage performances to digitally-equipped cinemas throughout the UK and abroad. Cannily, they chose Helen Mirren in Racine’s ‘Phaedra’ as the first production. Now, I’ve been in love with Dame Helen since at the age of 15 I first saw her on stage at Stratford, so I’m not surprised that the relays sold out in advance, and that, on the night itself, over 50,000 people in the UK saw the performance, and many more abroad. But the NT Live programme has continued successfully with less stellar casts, including relays of ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’ (hardly Shakespeare’s best known comedy) and the stage adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s teenage novel ‘Nation’.

NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) has just produced a report based on the first two NT relays, and it makes fascinating reading. It includes one astonishing finding—that the audiences in the cinema venues recorded significantly higher levels of emotional engagement than did the audience in the theatre itself!

Now that seems at first entirely counter-intuitive. But think about it. Most people are not habitués of live theatre, and those that are, go mostly to musicals and pantomimes. And what do those two theatrical forms have in common? Amplification. Now, I’ve been going to ‘straight’ theatre for over forty years, and my hearing’s still very good, but, even so, sometimes in large auditoria like the Eden Court’s Empire Theatre I find myself straining to hear the unamplified voice. We’ve just got too accustomed to everything being ‘loud and clear’.

But another finding in the NESTA report offers hope to the traditionalists: a large number of those at the cinema relays stated that they would now be more likely to go and experience ‘real’ live theatre. So, it seems to be a win/win situation—the National Theatre reaches out to audiences across the UK and it encourages those audiences to think they’d also enjoy a true theatrical experience. So it looks like HD live relays are here to stay. Indeed, they may even be a way of keeping open otherwise marginal cinema venues, as the box office returns for one live relay can be the equivalent of those for a week of conventional film screenings.

Finally, the NESTA report stresses that the crucial factor is the sense of sharing in a ‘live’ event. That, like me swaddled in my dressing gown, the cinema audiences are sharing in an experience ‘as it happens’. Curiously, the BBC seems to have missed this point entirely. Not only are the finals of major competitions—Cardiff Singer of the World, BBC Young Musician, Choir of the Year—regularly edited down and shown a day or more later, to fit the exigencies of ‘schedules’, but even that staple of Radio 3, the evening concert, has been mucked about. No longer do we have an announcer conveying the atmosphere in the hall, the hush as the conductor steps up to the podium, the (hopefully) warm applause, and then the interval with its own special twenty minute feature. Now, the concerts are broadcast days after they took place, the announcer never leaves the studio, and the interval, and most of the atmosphere, are edited out. Most of the time, one might as well be on Spotify.

What does all this mean for the Highlands and Islands? Well, most obviously, any local auditorium that is being equipped with digital projection equipment should be considered not just as a cinema but as a ‘digital venue’ in a much wider sense, including, of course, live sports relays as well. But there’s a more intriguing possibility. At the moment these HD live relays are global or national events, based on the recognised brands of world-famous companies, with big name casts or popular titles, or both. But, as the technology becomes more accessible, and as such relays become more of the norm, what scope will there be for the small, independent theatre company or venue?

Take the case of Dogstar Theatre’s ‘The Tailor of Inverness’. Mathew Zajac’s one man play about his search to find out the truth about his father’s life was a huge award-winning hit at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe, and went on to tour to Australia and Sweden, as well as round Scotland. And it’s likely to come out on tour again to meet continuing demand. But performing the play must take a lot out of Matthew, both physically and, given the subject matter, emotionally. And it’s self-evident that it only really makes sense with him playing the part. Suppose that, instead of going out on tour again, Matthew could reach a similar size of audience, and Dogstar could earn a larger fee for less cost, by presenting the play in an HD relay to venues in the UK and abroad–staged in the Eden Court’s One Touch Theatre, of course. ‘The Tailor of Inverness’, coming live from Inverness. Now, that would be worth getting out of bed for!

© Robert Livingston, 2010