Next best thing to a live performance takes off

The liveliness of the performing arts can be difficult to capture in another medium, but Australian National Theatre Live has managed it.

Founders of Australian National Theatre Live Grant Dodwell and Peter Hiscock. Picture: Britta Campion.

The Dapto Chaser is an Australian drama by Mary Rachel Brown that gets inside the dirty kennel of greyhound racing, gambling addiction and family dysfunction. It was commissioned by Wollongong’s Merrigong Theatre Company and later transferred to the Griffin Theatre in Sydney, a tiny venue where the audience is within spitting distance of the stage. It can feel as if you’re in the doghouse with the actors.

The liveliness and intimacy of the performing arts can be difficult to capture in another medium, but an independent outfit called Australian National Theatre Live has managed such a translation.

Its version of The Dapto Chaser, filmed at the Griffin, gets up close to the action. The setting is very obviously in a theatre — the on-screen drama does not have the naturalism of a narrative feature film — but it is not merely a static, one-camera record of a stage performance. The camerawork and editing offer multiple points of view as the play unfolds.

Earlier this month, The Dapto Chaser was screened at the Vision Splendid Outback Film Festival in Winton, Queensland, at the Royal Open Air Theatre. The session came immediately after Bruce Beres­ford’s coming-of-age movie Ladies in Black, and ANT Live co-founder Grant Dodwell admits he was worried about how the audience would respond to the gritty drama translated to the screen.

The 2015 production of The Dapto Chaser at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre. Picture: Robert Catto

“I thought: ‘These are people who don’t really care for theatre,’ ” he says. “But they saw an Australian story and Australian actors and they loved it … They were fascinated by the fact that they felt they were in the theatre, and they weren’t losing the theatrical experience.”

Dodwell and business partner Peter Hiscock are speaking at the Seymour Centre in Sydney where ANT Live is about to film its latest stage-to-screen production, The Gospel According to Paul. It’s comedian Jonathan Biggins’s one-man show about the rise and political demise of Paul Keating. Several cameras are installed at various spots in the auditorium, and two small cameras are mounted at the front of the stage. Biggins wears a small microphone and others are positioned in the audience to capture people’s responses.

During the past decade Australians have become used to the idea of seeing performing arts at the cinema. The first major push into this arena was by the Metropolitan Opera with its Met Live in HD series. What began with a cinematic version of The Magic Flute in 2006 is now an annual season of operas that is beamed around the world.

Other international performing arts companies have embraced the format, most notably Britain’s National Theatre with NT Live. Especially for audiences in far-flung parts of the globe such as Australia, cinema has proven to be an effective and enjoyable way of staying in touch with performing arts in the world’s great cultural centres — without having to buy an airfare.

In Australia, companies such as the Australian Ballet and West Australian Opera on occasion use digital cinema technology to broadcast live performances. British theatre magnate How­ard Panter of Trafalgar Entertain­ment Group, which is seeking to expand its business here, has spoken of permanently installing cameras in Australian theatres for live streaming or delayed transmission of shows including musicals.

ANT Live does not have the budgets of the Met or the National Theatre and so far its output has been comparatively modest: it has produced eight theatre productions for the screen, including the Malthouse-Sydney Theatre Company production of Michael Gow’s Away, Katherine Thomson’s Diving for Pearls, also filmed at Griffin, and the 15th anniversary season of The Wharf Revue.

Dodwell and Hiscock say they are providing an innovative service to the theatre sector, helping give Australian plays a life beyond the major cities and the regional-tour itinerary. While theatre companies often make archival videos of their performances — as an in-house documentary record, not for public viewing — ANT Live is helping give wider exposure to the work of Australian writers, actors and creative teams. Its films have been screened in 44 cinemas.

The Gospel According to Paul is Biggins’s uproariously funny and sympathetic impersonation of the former prime minister. It is produced by Jo Dyer’s Soft Tread Enterprises and opened at the Merrigong in February before a national tour.

Biggins is known for his Keating act as part of The Wharf Revue, but here he turns a sketch performance into a 90-minute solo turn that is in part a biographical slide show, a replay of Keatingesque rhetoric and insult, and a meditation on the costs and responsibilities of power. During the performance, this writer sat between Labor leader Anthony Albanese and a camera operator who was in quiet communication, via a headset, with the control desk at the back of the auditorium.

The art of acting on camera is very different from that of acting on stage, but Dodwell and Hiscock say they do not want the actors to change a thing for the filmed performances. The intention is to capture a theatrical event, not a made-for-cinema variation of it.

Unlike the NT Live productions — which are filmed and transmitted simultaneously — Dodwell and Hiscock take considerable pains to edit the footage in a way that is more like post-production on a feature film. The producer, writer and director of the original theatre show have approval of the final cut.

Jonathan Biggins as Paul Keating in The Gospel According to Paul. Picture: Brett Boardman

“Especially in this show, the timing of the gags is critical,” Hiscock says before the performance of The Gospel According to Paul. “The humour is in the timing. That means the editing has to be very precise — start from a wide shot, cut in for a close-up, transition from one place to another.”

Biggins says that, after initial doubts, he was impressed by the work ANT Live had done on The Wharf Revue.

“The audience responded as if they were in the theatre,” he says, referring to those watching on the big screen. “They applauded at the end of every sketch. We were filled with trepidation because normally these things (films of live theatre) just die.”

Biggins is still on tour with The Gospel According to Paul and ANT Live’s version is expected to be in selected cinemas towards the end of the year.

Dodwell and Hiscock believe that, with the right investment and marketing support, ANT Live could be a bigger concern. But they have been frustrated by the response of funding agencies and have found that their mission to film live Australian theatre falls between two stools. The Australia Council, they say, regards an ANT Live production as film and Screen Australia regards it as theatre.

“They come out with all these high-flying ideas about being new and innovative, and catching up with industry developments, but they don’t really practise that,” Hiscock says. ANT Live did receive a grant through Catalyst — which was able to support projects that fell outside normal Australia Council guidelines — before the contentious federal arts fund was discontinued.

Each ANT Live production costs about $150,000 to $180,000 including performer and producer fees. (Hiscock says they pay actors a rate agreed with union the Media Entertainment and & Arts Alli­ance, and distribute a percentage of revenue to the originating theatre company and producer.) While ANT Live was set up as a potential profit-making venture, Dodwell and Hiscock are looking at a philanthropic model to support the operation and are seeking approval to be a deductible gift recipient to accept donations.

As with the Met’s Live in HD operas, and Britain’s NT Live theatre, ANT Live is producing high-quality video of Australian theatre for the fraction of the cost of a feature film. It’s narrative drama in a new medium; and as a substitute for live theatre, it’s almost as good as being there.