'Common Lore' Goes Live! By Sophia Hatfield
On Saturday 25th April the Stute Theatre team embarked upon a new adventure. After weeks of planning and remote rehearsal, we were finally able to share our show with a live audience from a secure (socially distanced) studio.
It was a nerve-wracking, exhilarating, wonderful experience which involved performing the show from a closed studio, with a micro-team editing shots and streaming the performance live from next door. Our director Bryn Holding was even patched in from his home to direct the show from afar.
It was a huge effort and I am so proud of the whole team for bringing this together in such a short space of time, under incredibly challenging circumstances. As a bit of a technical novice, I’m having to learn extremely fast to keep our work going in digital form whilst we can’t perform in theatres and libraries, but we were in excellent hands with the team at King St Studios.
I have to say, in a very short space of time I have learned an awful lot about performing theatre for screen. Film and television scripts often have far less dialogue than theatre scripts. They’re economical, developed for a visual medium where a close-up look can convey just as much as the spoken word. The ‘Common Lore’ script is certainly not designed for TV viewing. It’s fast-paced, full of rich language and word play – designed to grab the audience’s attention and keep it, in a busy library or classroom. Our show is peppered with live music, movement sequences and larger than life characters. During rehearsals we realised very quickly that the performance style would have to shift and adjust slightly for audience members to experience it on a screen. As a performer, I’m used to high-energy performances in busy public spaces and I had to really scale it back.
But… The benefits of sharing theatre in this way are huge. We’ve been able to caption the performance, making it more accessible. We have been able to offer it to schools and youth theatres as an educational tool. We have been able to take our work to people who would otherwise never have been able to see a live performance.
After a few adjustments, a bit of rehearsal and a lot of hard work, we were so pleased to have been able to create a genuinely live performance of our show to share online.
Thank you so much to everyone who’s already tuned it or donated. You can still see the live stream for two weeks on our website here: https://www.stutetheatre.co.uk/tour-dates or on our Stute Theatre YouTube channel.
We’ll be back with live dates as soon as we can – but in the meantime, enjoy!
Photo by Lucas Smith Photography.
