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Theatre in the Digital AgeDateline: 22nd May, 2005I don't think I'll ever want to see another production of La Traviata. Not, I hasten to add, because of any dislike of Verdi's admittedly somewhat sentimental masterpiece. Quite the contrary, in fact. You see I've just watched Richard Eyre's Covent Garden production, conducted by Solti and starring Angela Gheorghiou as Violetta It is stunning! Gheorghiou, in particular, is superb: here is an operatic diva (for such she is) who sings and acts wonderfully. She is well supported by the rest of the cast, especially Leo Nucci as Giorgio Germont, often the weakest character in less assured hands, and the other aspects of the production, particularly Jean Calman's lighting, contribute in no small measure to what is arguably the definitive version of the opera. Now, had I been sitting in the Royal Opera House, I would have (a) remortgaged my house to get a ticket for another performance, and (b) if that failed, been keen to see another production in the hope that it would match this one. But I didn't see it at Covent Garden: I watched it at home, more than ten years after it was produced. Some friends bought it for me on DVD as a birthday present some weeks ago. Now, instead of having a probably inaccurate and definitely liable to fade memory of an ephemeral experience, I can revisit that experience whenever I wish, with anticipation but also with one hundred percent confidence that I will both be moved and will enjoy. I know that even my first experience of the performance isn't quite the same as being in the audience with the production catching fire on stage in front of me. Having watched it, I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to share my excitement with someone else who had shared the experience. I wanted to babble on with "Wasn't this great?" or "What did you think of that?" or "I've never seen the other done so well". But there is a consolation: I can recapture the experience whenever the mood takes me. I have never experienced this excitement when watching videotapes, probably because of the limitations of VHS in terms of picture and sound quality. DVD, however, is a very different matter: the quality makes even high-band video look and sound rough. The emergence of the Digital Versatile Disk and digital technology generally is bound to have an effect on live theatre - or, at least, on our reactions to it. When we can see the best at the touch of a button - although we have quite a way to go yet, for so few productions are published on DVD - how will we react to anything less than the best when it is live? Will the excitement, the frisson of the live performance - even of the less than the best live performance - be enough to tempt us into the theatre or will we only go to see the new, scouting, as it were, for the next DVD purchase? Or have we heard all this before? Didn't the birth of cinema herald the death of theatre? Didn't the birth of TV herald the death of theatre and cinema? Didn't the birth of the video recorder herald the death of cinema, theatre and possibly even TV? Threatened with death, they adapted. Theatre will have to adapt to the threat - or perhaps we should call it the opportunity - of the DVD. Perhaps it has already begun. Perhaps the high tech scenery, whether Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's flying car or The Woman In White's video scenery, is the start of theatre's adaptation to the digital world. Perhaps the theatre of the future will be a marriage between digital technology and live performance. Or perhaps it will go in another direction, towards the small-scale, the intimate. Or perhaps both, or even in other directions we can't even imagine at the moment. Interesting times, eh? Interesting times.
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