Stage to Screen

Imposssible Things before Breakfast: Traverse Live

City Screen/Picturehouse and Traverse Theatre have recently signed a deal to do a live broadcast of play readings to cinemas around the UK. The one-off event will transmit five newly commissioned plays by leading playwrights: Marina Carr, David Eldridge, Linda McLean, Simon Stephens and Enda Walsh.

Audiences will be able to buy tickets to see the event at the theatre or at the cinema, as it is broadcast in High Definition to Picturehouse Cinemas across the UK, including the Cameo in Edinburgh. The show: Impossible Things before Breakfast: Traverse Live, will take place on the 23rd August, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and, rather excitingly, tickets to the event at Traverse also include breakfast! The move seeks to combine the medium of theatre and cinema and create ‘a new art form’ (Lyn Goleby, Managing Director of Picturehouse Cinemas.

Traverse Theatre has long been known for encouraging new talent and experimental theatre. As well as having their own playwrights in residence, every season the Traverse runs a series of workshops and events designed to encourage and support emerging talent, and also commissions translations of successful international plays. This year, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, along with Impossible things before Breakfast, the Traverse will put on seventeen plays.

For many, theatre is an aged art-form, long ago replaced by the more realist medium that is cinema; this collaboration demonstrates the reverse. For a long time cinema has been dependent upon codes and practises developed in the theatre; now it is helping out an aged parent in this move, and developing a new interdependency between the two art-forms. The transmission will entail the live immediacy of a theatre performance, something that has been lost in the pre-recorded film industry. With this, people will go to the cinema to watch a live performance event; Picturehouse is offering a wider and more diverse audience to the theatre and also making theatre itself into a cinema experience.

The experience of going to the cinema is entirely different from that of the theatre: when we go to see a film, we see art that is complete; when we go to the theatre we see the art in creation. Wondering if an actor has forgotten their line, seeing them make a false move and then recover, or seeing them find a new facet to the character as they stand on stage, is all part of theatre. There is an uncertainty to the theatre that the cinema doesn’t entail. Plays are constantly evolving in front of the audience; no two performances will be the same. Postmodern theatre often seeks to exploit this uncertainty; breaking down the fallacy of the fourth wall and challenging the audience to think about performance and art.

This is a concept that the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is no stranger to. In a festival in which many plays are taking place in ‘theatre’s’ of all shapes and sizes, there is often no fourth wall to break down. Some of the most successful shows last year were off-the-cuff performances that demanded that the audience dictate the storyline and the actors improvise on the spot. In its very design the Edinburgh Fringe encourages new forms of art and expression. There are no where near enough theatres in Edinburgh to house the hundreds of plays that will take place this August, so companies will find diverse new venues from portaloos to the basement of shops. Even in the theatres, the space is often so small that the enforced closeness breaks down traditional audience/actor boundaries and allows us to experience a new kind of performance.

The Edinburgh Fringe encourages diversity and new forms of expression. With this deal City Screen are including Cinemas around the UK in a new kind of performance and simultaneously in one of the world’s biggest arts festivals.