Poor John Dennis. In 1709, the playwright devised a novel technology to simulate thunder to accompany his drama Appius and Virginia. The play flopped and was promptly booted out of the theatre. To add salt to the wound, Dennis’s thunder-generating technique was stolen and inserted into a staging of Macbeth. He accused the producers of ‘stealing his thunder’, birthing the phrase that has long outlived his work.
Stage technology has come a long way since. Directors have a toy box of high-tech smoke and mirrors at their disposal. Perhaps it’s more of a Pandora’s box. Live on-stage cameras are particularly in vogue. Watch them crawling all over Jamie Lloyd’s monotone Romeo and Juliet and Ivo van Hove’s ill-fated Opening Night. They’re even parodied in Inside No. 9 Stage/Fright. First for tragedy, then for farce: that’s how you know an artistic fad has overstayed its welcome.
Pioneered by director Katie Mitchell, real-time projections are not simply a directorial trick but have become a bona fide genre: ‘live cinema’. Her 2006 adaption of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, which won praise for its synchronisation of actors and technology, was perhaps its high-water mark. Her last London production, Bluets, at the Royal Court last year, was the kind of thing you might stumble upon in a dimly lit back-room of Tate Modern. It left me with a migraine, my eyes zigzagging between stage and screen.
Tech can of course work. But only when theatrical form follows function. The Seagull, a play about acting, art and artifice, is primed for disassembly. It has plenty to say about our terminally online age, something director Thomas Ostermeier recently played up in his anarchic production at the Barbican.
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