There is a moment in Anna Breckon and Nat Randall's play Set Piece when Holly (played by Randall) walks into the audience's view wearing a glass strap-on dildo.
Some parts of the audience started laughing when they saw her. Others were confused that people around them were laughing; they had been watching two characters sharing a tender moment in bed together on screen.
It's an example of the different ways audiences may experience what has been described as "cine-theatre": the blending of live performance with filmmaking on stage.
"People looking at different things are having different emotional experiences that are interfering with each other … The idea was around how the film frame excludes information or directs certain things, [and] playing with that dynamic," explains Breckon.
Randall adds: "Often what we find is that [the] frame [on screen] is completely different to what the live moment is … There's this tension between emotional states that can be in sync or totally not."
It's that tension that is interesting to Breckon and Randall.
"For us, that was a pleasure, [seeing] what these two spaces can offer each other in tandem," says Randall.
Set Piece, which premiered in Sydney in January, is Breckon and Randall's second excursion into melding live performance with filmmaking, following 2016's 24-hour feat of endurance, The Second Woman.
They are among a cohort of Australian theatre makers who have in recent years played with the storytelling potential of live video, including Sydney Theatre Company artistic director Kip Williams (The Picture of Dorian Gray), Perth independent theatre outfit The Last Great Hunt (Lé Nør [the rain]), and award-winning playwright and screenwriter Anchuli Felicia King (Slaughterhouse).
These artists working today join Australian theatre directors who have been working with filmic elements since at least the mid-2000s, using live camera to express ideas about celebrity (Sisters Grimm, Calpurnia Descending), surveillance (Benedict Andrews, The Maids; The Season at Sarsaparilla), and memory (Eamon Flack, The Glass Menagerie).
Room for interpretation
Both Set Piece and The Second Woman allow the audience to see actors' emotions up close in real time.
"We managed to arrive at a distinctly cinematic style, rather than a theatrical style amplified through the camera," says Randall.
But it's emotion – ordinary emotion – that is at the centre of the artists' practice.
"I think cinema can capture this low-level, ordinary feeling in a way that gives it dramatic stakes," explains Breckon.
In The Second Woman, Randall acted opposite 100 amateur actors over 24 hours, repeating a single scene in which a couple argue over their relationship. That scene is filmed both in close-up by a handheld camera and in mid-shot by four stationary cameras.
The handheld camera allowed for a naturalistic acting style from the actors — as well as full visibility for the audience.
Randall notes that the cameras "de-hierarchise" the two-page script of The Second Woman; the visual language of the work is more important than the text, with meaning often arising through subtext.
Breckon explains: "The script becomes the vehicle for meaning to be made subtextually, which is more common to cinema, whereas theatre has a built-in preference for the text."
Those subtextual meanings were especially obvious when the show was performed in Taiwan by local actor Zhu Zhi-Ying, in Mandarin.
"You could totally interpret the experience on stage through the cameras and through the emotion. The subtext doesn't have to necessarily land with the word, but it can land with an image of the face or a blink or a look," Randall says.
Many emotional directions
Set Piece takes place in an older lesbian couple's apartment, where they are hosting a younger couple. The work features looping scenes, often with alternative endings.
In one scene, a camera offers a bird's-eye view of Randall as Holly lying under a transparent table as she tries to manoeuvre a potato chip into her mouth.
"It's almost like a photograph in the way we've choreographed it. It's really important that it is live — that struggle in relation to the chip," says Randall.
While the on-stage movements are tightly choreographed – for both the actors and camera operators – there is room left for unexpected moments.
"There is a different level that the performers are arriving at every time they do a similar loop … There is a possibility to move in any kind of emotional direction," says Randall.
"It's a truly live experience."
For the actors, there is nowhere to hide. "With a close-up the performers' emotional state is so visible, you can see all the nuances going on," says Breckon.
The cameras in Set Piece also offer audience members angles on the stage they couldn't usually see.
"Instead of being in one position theatrically and seeing from that spot, you're seeing from a multitude of positions," explains Breckon.
In traditional theatre productions, actors direct their performances out to the audience — projecting to the back wall. Acting for film and TV, however, requires actors to perform to the camera.
The addition of cameras to theatre means actors don't perform to either the camera or to the audience — but to each other.
"[The performances] just have to all be directed into the space, and then held within that space and held between the performers, so the audience can be looking in on the world," says Breckon.
Randall explains how it feels for her as an actor, as well as co-creator, to balance emotional openness with tight blocking: "We had to contort our bodies for Set Piece [in terms of the choreography], but still maintain full availability and emotion. It was like slamming two things together at once, or holding them both together [at the same time]."
Live video on a budget
Thai Australian playwright and screenwriter Anchuli Felicia King appreciates the way that theatre allows a playwright and director to control the audience's experience of time. Meanwhile, in film and TV, writers and directors are responsible for framing the audience's perspective.
By incorporating live video in theatre, you're doing both – and, in King's words, "intentionally refracting the audience's gaze".
"If the audience is looking in two different places simultaneously, what is that doing to their experience of the story?" she says.
It's something King had to consider when she was making her 2019 play Slaughterhouse – which premiered in Sydney as part of Belvoir's 25A program, an initiative that challenges independent theatre makers to create a show for less than $1,500.
Slaughterhouse is the story of an ethical eating startup – where its employees (and their drug dealer) recall a violent event at a work party, via a series of monologues.
"[Slaughterhouse is] about refracted perspectives," explains King.
"We [King and director Benita de Wit] intentionally wanted to use the video in the show like a magic trick … You were seeing one thing on stage, and you were seeing something else on screen. And sometimes those two aligned and sometimes they diverged."
For Slaughterhouse, the budget for video was about $100, with the material streamed to a small projection screen in Belvoir's Downstairs space.
"We had to be extremely creative with the video out of necessity … It [Slaughterhouse] was extremely precise and targeted in its use of video just because we had to be."
King wanted three live cameras in the space, which the production couldn't afford. Instead, the footage seemingly filmed live by a camera in the ceiling – a bird's-eye view – was prerecorded.
"[We] meticulously staged the action on stage so that you would believe for most of the scene that it was filming live, and then they would start to diverge," she says.
The actors also became comfortable pulling around, rehearsing with, and stepping over a camera attached to a huge cable.
"Everybody has to be on board with the fact that you're doing the show for no money and you're trying to make it as spectacular and as polished as you can make it, even though you're not sufficiently resourced to do it," says King.
Making magic
Video elements in a piece of theatre can create emotional intensity, a sense of spectacle, or a deliberate disconnect between what's happening on stage and on screen, King says.
"In some ways, you have to apply the dramaturgy [dramatic composition] of a magic show to doing live video in theatre. It's about surprise, misdirection, spectacle … How do you make it magic? And when that's done right, it really does feel like a magic show. And people are much more emotionally open when they're surprised or delighted or enchanted."
There is a risk in theatre that something could go wrong, a risk that is only amplified by the introduction of live video. But that sense of risk — and of surprise — is what she calls a "dramaturgical weapon".
"Things could go wrong so often, and so quickly, that when they don't go wrong, it's extra delightful … In the best version of an audience member feeling surprised, they have found a new way of being in space, or they found a new way of seeing."
Still, there are pitfalls to using live video in theatre.
"The worst live video in theatre is just film, and the audience is just watching something that has been meticulously staged for the camera," King says.
"You're sitting in the audience, and you're like, 'Oh, look how virtuosic this is.' And you're actually not emotionally engaged because you're just watching how clever the video is … It's not actually changing you as a person, which is the hope for any artist."
Playing around in the dark
For Perth independent theatre company The Last Great Hunt, making theatre is all about process. They devise all their own work – working with designers and with their chosen medium from the outset.
That means that when they're working with live cameras, those cameras are in the room from the very start of rehearsals.
"[Cameras] are not an afterthought … They are as crucial to the development process as an actor," says Adriane Daff, one of the company's co-founders.
The concept for their 2019 Perth Festival show, Lé Nør [the rain], was born out of their 2014 show Falling Through Clouds, which used a handheld camera to craft dream sequences.
"We started accidentally making a different show while we were supposed to be rehearsing this other show," Daff explains.
Lé Nør [the rain] was a significant development for the company — a fake foreign film created live on stage, featuring a made-up language that mashed together Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Afrikaans, Bulgarian and Arabic, with English surtitles.
Sometimes the team will approach a show wanting to experiment with a green screen, for example; other times, the need for a technical element will arise from the script.
"Whether the form leads or whether it's the script that leads, there's always an eye in The Last Great Hunt on: what does it look like? What is the visual language of the show? … What does this thing look like when you dream about it at night and close your eyes and have a $2 million budget?" Daff says.
For 2021's Hyperdream, a black box theatre in Sydney was transformed into a makeshift TV studio, where live video and green screens brought to life a simulated reality – one where customers can revisit painful memories.
On day one, Daff and her collaborators set up a green screen, cameras and a computer – and they started to play.
"It [great ideas] can only come from really free play; what we call turning off all the lights and playing around in the dark," she says.
Through lengthy improvisation, recorded on a separate camera, they uncovered ideas to explore further, such as camera movements or blocking that created an interesting visual effect.
"I really, really believe that if you just trust the process and give yourself over to it, the show will tell you what it wants to be," says Daff.
The Last Great Hunt are self-taught when it comes to filmmaking – and that too helps spark their creativity.
"The idea of doing something a little bit like cowboy or a little bit DIY is never something we've shied away from, because you're in flow, you're improvising, you're making something," says Daff.
Forgiving audiences
When The Last Great Hunt were making Lé Nør [the rain], the group considered just how much of the film production process they should show on stage.
The feedback they received from audiences was that they wanted to see more.
"[They said,] 'I want to see you scurrying around and lying on the floor and then getting up and running back. I want to see that. I want to see more, more, more … We want to see that it's happening right in front of us,'" Daff says.
Daff suggests that live-ness means audiences approach the work more generously than they would a film.
"The audiences are more forgiving … You wouldn't be able to get away with as much [if it was a film]," says Daff.
Whistleblower, The Last Great Hunt's 2021 Perth Festival show, starred a member of the audience who "woke up" at the start of the play handcuffed to a hospital bed, with a mission to uncover their identity.
The choose-your-own-adventure style was inherently theatrical, even as hidden cameras and camera technicians dressed in white lab coats tracked the character's journey on stage.
Watching Whistleblower, Hyperdream or Lé Nør [the rain] is not the same as watching a film being made live on stage – but is rather its own form of theatre.
"We're not trying to make a movie," says Daff.
"We know that watching actors on camera, you can get closer to their faces, it can feel more intimate … I see it as using all of the tools that we have at our disposal while still unapologetically making a piece of theatre."
Cracking open the form
Sydney Theatre Company (STC) artistic director Kip Williams agrees with Anchuli Felicia King that theatre is defined by the concept of space. But the advantage of cinema, he says, is that it can take audiences to endless new settings – including the unconscious mind.
"I love the way that cinema can dive into the unconscious, into the dream-scape, and the way that a cinematic reality can collapse and fold and bend," he says.
"[I'm interested in] the way that you can play with the gaze of the camera and subvert it … I do think the elasticity of live theatre invites that playfulness in such a beautiful way."
Williams has been working on the idea of cine-theatre since 2015, when he opened his production of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer with a 30-minute-long, unbroken shot of the actors, who were hidden from the audience by a large white scrim.
"Suddenly [Last Summer] was a terrifying leap of faith for me … I had no idea if it was going to work," he says.
"The deployment of live video and using multiple cameras opened up a way of telling stories that could allow an audience to look at them [the characters] from multiple perspectives," he told ABC TV's Art Works.
"It really cracked open a form that could allow me to look at truth and identity and how we reveal and conceal parts of ourselves."
He has since refined the technique across another five productions: Miss Julie for Melbourne Theatre Company in 2016; and for STC, A Cheery Soul and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 2018, The Picture of Dorian Gray in 2020, and Julius Caesar in 2021.
In The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, the audience could see the filmmaking process, even as they were immersed in a fully realised cinematic world – a tension that Williams says spoke to ideas around constructing and performing identity.
"[The Resistible Rise of Arturo] Ui was a big step forward in developing the form [of cine-theatre]."
Williams's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray earned rave reviews thanks to its inventive storytelling and the masterful performance of star Eryn Jean Norvill, who played 26 characters, visible on stage and across six screens. The play has since toured to Adelaide and Melbourne, and is now set to tour to Broadway and London's West End.
This month, Williams returned to the hybrid form with Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which melds genre conventions from cinema – such as the black-and-white aesthetic of film noir and the uneasy close-ups of horror movies – with the immediacy of theatre.
In the adaptation, Ewen Leslie plays all the characters, including Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – except for Mr Utterson (played by Matthew Backer). Live and prerecorded video allows Leslie to constantly shapeshift.
"What they [the actors and crew] create is this immersive experience where you fall into Victorian England and then into the nightmares of Utterson and Dr Jekyll, and then ultimately into this beautiful story about the friendship that they share with one another," Williams told Art Works.
Synthesis of form and content
Williams's work with live video generally starts in an empty theatre, with the camera operators visible to the audience. These conventions expose the sense of artifice that is inherent to theatre – that is, the knowledge that what is happening on stage isn't real.
"[These techniques] implicitly say to audiences, 'This is not real; [but] you're going to make it real.'"
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray are each concerned with the differences between our outward and private selves. Exposing the artifice of theatre is one way to draw out that theme in a kind of synthesis between form and content.
At the same time, Williams says, each play gestures to the way that people perceive cameras as authoritative and truthful.
"[We're] up-ending that at times … The screen can take us into the unconscious and into different landscapes, and [can] dominate character and audience, but also swell a character to a point of authority and scale," he says.
"Theatre uses screens that are large; they literally dominate an audience, and they can dominate the character — and I play with that a lot in Jekyll and Hyde."
For Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the screens are initially foregrounded – the audience immediately absorbed into a fully realised, film noir-style universe. But much of the mechanics of making the filmed elements are obscured, often behind sets.
This choice – and the gradual unwinding of this conceit, as the actors and camera operators become gradually more visible and the screens less intrusive – highlights how the characters reveal their inner selves over the course of the play.
"[The mechanics of filmmaking are] intentionally backgrounded to plunge the audience immediately into a much more cinematic universe that will strip back and unravel throughout, and will hopefully then find the truth underneath the artifice," Williams explains.
To live-stream or prerecord
For the first four years that Williams worked with filmmaking in theatre, he was determined to only use live video.
In Suddenly Last Summer, the actors ran underneath the stage — an extra technical demand on the production.
"All through tech, the production manager was saying, 'Just prerecord it'… And I was like, 'No, it must be live!'"
But while it could be an extra challenge, working exclusively with live video provided a foundation for Williams's later work.
"I think the live-ness of it affects people profoundly in [helping theatre] feel human and real," he says.
"If you took this footage, and played it back to people, it would be nowhere near as powerful as the unconscious-but-deeply-felt knowledge that the thing they're watching is happening right now. And that is ultimately the great power of theatre."
Now, with Dorian Gray and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Williams is more comfortable using prerecorded footage – so long as that sense of live-ness is palpable throughout.
Williams told ABC RN's The Stage Show that Dorian Gray and Jekyll and Hyde are innovative because of their integration of live and prerecorded video, and live performance — and their use of mobile phone technology and filters.
"That's pushing the limits and breaking, I hope, into new spaces as to how creatively and theatrically you can deploy these devices," he said.
In each show, Williams says there's only about 30 seconds where there's no live performer either on screen or on stage.
"It's a sort of underpinning fundamental, that the theatre always takes precedence in these works. It's never cinema first. It's always theatre first. And it's always the connection between the audience and the performer that underpins every moment of the show."
Making theatre using cinema then is not a gimmick for Williams – but is primarily a way to explore themes and ideas.
"I'll only make these shows as long as there are stories that ask for this form to be deployed. But I think that there's a few to come."
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde runs until September 10 at Sydney Theatre Company.
