All across the world, theatres are looking at live streaming and online broadcasting of previous productions to keep audiences entertained during the current global pandemic. This includes theatre producers on Broadway who are considering live-streaming pay-per-view solutions.

However, Titchfield Festival Theatre can rightly claim to be one of the first in the world to pioneer live streaming! In 2011 Kevin Fraser and the team wanted to reach new and bigger audiences and decided to produce their very own live streaming of Macbeth performed at St Margarets Lane Theatre. Macbeth was the first show to be streamed along with several others including a new production of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein adapted by TFT’s own Paul King. It was a brilliant production which was very well received around the world by avid followers of the Frankenstein story. 

The theatre was set-up with four cameras; one on stage, two either side of the auditorium and one at the back. At the time, Wi-Fi was not available and technology not so far advanced as is the case today. To create the live feed, wires and cabling connected the cameras from the auditorium into a production room, where the live feeds were mixed to give the best shots, just as they are in today’s TV studios. The finished mixed stream was then finally broadcast via the internet with an approximate 60 second lag.

Kevin recalls those exciting times: “There is nothing to beat sitting in a theatre and watching live productions. Our current temporary closure sadly doesn’t make that possible, of course. We’ve always been keen to explore new and innovative ways of reaching more people, so nine years ago our team led by Robert King and Richard Hackett came up with the idea of live streaming Macbeth. It was a great success; we had audiences from the United States, Japan, Canada and Australia and other places in Europe all tuning in and paying a small fee to watch the whole production, including a whole class from a school in the USA.

Macbeth was our very first live streaming and given the connection between Shakespeare and Titchfield – the playwright having lived and worked in the village – the Bard represented the natural choice. Nevertheless the theatre is open to other ideas too. Kevin continued, “Staircase written by Charles Dyer in 1966, is one of my favourite plays, a marvellous two hander first performed by us in 2014. It tells the story of a pair of gay East End barbers and is a real gem. Small cast plays like this would be ideal to stream or perhaps in the new digital age we could act them out independently at home, cut them together and stream. Or even stream them as radio plays, cut together and put onto the net. Any thing is possible and we are excited about progressing this new digital project.

For more information, please go to http://titchfieldfestivaltheatre.com/or contact our Box Office on 0333 6663366 (24 hour service) or for Group Bookings 01329 600010.