There’s nothing quite like the theatre; but in a cost of living crisis, National Theatre Live is a welcome compromise

With ticket prices soaring and funding nowhere to be seen, Theatre is starting to look dangerously archaic. While far from perfect, the National Theatre Live programme may be the best compromise in keeping accessible an art form as old as time.

As convenient as it would be for the opening of this article, I can’t actually remember the first time I went to the theatre. And though there are memories from my childhood — most notably of the incredibly life-like puppets in War Horse that left my fascinated and a little scared — truth be told it is something that I came a little later to. To Kill a MockingBird, Orlando, My Neighbour Totoro and Andrew Scott’s one man show of Vanya are a few that I have seen in the past two years; not as much as I would like, but a far increase from the once-every-five-year-or-so average I managed between learning to talk and turning eighteen. I remember each of these experiences fondly, and often forget that at least one of them wasn’t in a theatre at all. In fact, I saw Vanya in a slightly chilly warehouse that the owners — usually a shipping and delivery company — had hauled some sofa’s into, put a projector in the back and called a cinema. It was one of the best experiences of the bunch.

Theatre of any form can ask an awful lot from an audience. But asking audiences to earnestly follow one man prance around a stage pretending to be eight different people slowly driving each other crazy sounds like a stretch. Remove from that actually being in a traditional theatre setting and it sounds like a rather tall order. And yet such is the magic of theatre that come the end I watched on and kept waiting for the rest of the cast to come on to bow. It was like watching a film that is so engrossing you forget it is black and white.

When I first stumbled upon the National Theatre Live programme I was about as skeptical as anyone who has been in university since 2020, and has had to sit through the cinematic magic of pre-recorded lectures. Hardly the greatest way to experience theatre. Fortunately, the National Theatre has done a little more than prop a phone up in the audience and then send the footage to cinemas. Rather, it presents that almost as much care and consideration has been put into recording these performances as putting them on in the first place. Instead of a static camera in the audience throughout the plays, in what would doubtlessly fail in attempting to recreate being in a theatre audience, National Theatre Live instead creates something new; with camera angles and editing, the result is neither cinema nor theatre, but feels almost like they’ve created something new.

For better or worse, no digital media is ever going to be capable of creating the effect that can be experienced sitting in a live theatre audience. But theatre tickets are skyrocketing, and so is the cost of living. Funding for the arts is in a dire state, and the Theatre Live programme is never going to solve these problems. Theatre’s are suffering, and many production companies are being faced with the decision to fork out fortunes for celebrity casts, or deal with empty seats. Without government aid and education encouraging interest in the arts, these things are unlikely to change. But for the other side of the equation, the would-be audience goers who don’t live in the countries major cities, or can’t afford the steep theatre tickets, National Theatre Live is an invaluable compromise.