Filmed theatre - to be or not to be? In this case, 'to be' is not in question
Filmed theatre — the recording and subsequent screening of a live stage production — isn't to many tastes. it usually has neither the immediacy of a good play nor the visual brio of a good film. I've been wary of the form ever since my school showed us an astonishingly dull 'film' of The Merchant of Venice, which felt like it was created by having a stationary camera placed in the first row at a theatre.
And yet, I loved a recent screening of The Motive and the Cue, Jack Thorne's play about the inter-generational clashes between two major British actors, John Gielgud and Richard Burton, during a 1964 Hamlet production in which the former directed the latter.
One reason for this is that I'm a Hamlet nut, and have some interest in the real-life figures depicted here (especially Gielgud, superbly played by Mark Gatiss, but also Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who were newly-weds at the time). To appreciate this play, you need that interest. But even otherwise, M&C didn't feel static.
Cinematically, you'd never mistake this for an Oppenheimer. But it was thoughtfully put together. Some of the establishing scenes were long shots where you could see not just the entire stage but also part of the original theatre audience sitting in the dark. Once a scene proper got underway and the camera zoomed in to the action, there were cuts and close-ups.
It was a strange, compelling experience — not 'cinema' as one thinks of it, and yet a reminder that there have been so many different types of films, including the anti-narrative
