Stage Struck

Peter Crawleyon theatre going straight to video

Last year the director Sam Mendes was asked by a film magazine if he was excited about the possibility of working in 3-D. He replied that he already did – “It’s called theatre”.

Now that’s a riposte which ought to cheer up any theatre makers still threatened by the moving image. But fewer theatre makers see themselves in competition with film. In fact, they’re quite keen to use it, hauling cameras onstage, turning portions of their stages into canvasses for projections, and fleshing out their stories with various media.

Not only do they get the benefits of briskly moving film techniques and lightning-fast scene changes, but, when it reaches the stage, film itself gets to behave in new ways.

Look at Sodome, My Love, which reveals a stage spilling with video projections, a blur of night-time traffic and subway trains streaming across its set. Actor Olwen Fouéré is initially folded in the semi-gloom, but our clearest glimpse of her comes via video projection. With her white face magnified and clear enough to dominate the stage, the character gradually awakens from centuries of imprisonment, and her visage cascades with rainwater.

It’s an intimacy borrowed directly from film grammar. Fouéré is ready for her close-up.

Using film onstage is hardly new; what seems to be changing is the way it's used. Jack Phelan, who is credited with designing the "video systems" for Sodome, has been responsible for some of the most invigorating multimedia on our stage recently.

In Una Santa Oscura, a wordless musical piece, Phelan used moving images to complement the character, occasionally resembling a giant thought-bubble. His work on Freefall put the audience into the helpless point of view of a comatose character in a hospital bed, while Love and Moneyallowed him to stretch an e-mail exchange across the set and mingle its text with the spoken dialogue, crucially never making the actor or the technology compete for our attention.

Images can now supply the set design of a show, creating whole worlds around the bodies of live performers. When DV8's To Be Straight with Youvisited Dublin, its dancers occupied a roughly summoned and instantly dispelled landscape of moving images.

The most enjoyable example was Mamoru Iriguchi's Pregnant?!, which encircled his body with an ever-changing scenography of winningly crude PowerPoint animations. Iriguchi's wild imagination and rudimentary graphics could lead us anywhere: one scene introduced us to a traditional pub located somewhere in the spinal cortex of his mother. It's an unexpected benefit of going straight to video.

It's not always inspired – both the Tales of Ballycumberand Hauntedused video design, but neither conceived of it as much more than a distraction as they rearranged the furniture between scenes. But the growing sophistication of video design recognises that it best serves a show when it functions like an extra character. Here, you don't need to distinguish between 3-D performances or 2-D backdrops.

If its done right, bringing film to theatre actually adds another dimension.

pcrawley@irishtimes.com