Broadcasting theatre on the big screen

National Theatre Live, which celebrates its 10^th anniversary in June, has thus far drawn 8.8 million people to some 91,000 global cinema screenings of 74 productions.

The majority of these have been shot live and delivered live from the National Theatre on London’s South Bank, but many co-productions have come from the Almeida Theatre, Donmar Warehouse, The Young Vic, The Old Vic, Nottingham Playhouse and via several West End partners.

So how does the NT Live operate technically and creatively around what are satellite delivered broadcasts?

Revising the script
Technical producer Chris Bretnall, who heads his own company Creative Broadcast Solutions, is a veteran of all 74 NT Live productions, 120 Met operas, 50 Royal Opera House productions, 30 Bolshoi ballets and 30 Royal Shakespeare Company shows, he explains a tried and trusted routine currently in use on I’m Not Running – a play by David Hare which runs until the end of the year.

“Our core way of doing the rehearsal involves the whole team. Heads of department go to see it when it hits the stage, and we then do a scratch recording. We do a camera script from that, and test it at the first rehearsal with full facility on camera,” says Bretnall.

“We then revise the camera script and watch how that went in the cinema, essentially how it translated from an OB-style environment. We revise the first and then do the second rehearsal, only doing mini revisions overnight.”

Bretnall is a fan and five-year user of UHD. “The system gives us the trilogy of greater resolution with the pixels, a colour space we can exploit with digital cinema projectors, and it gives us HDR,” he says.

“We keep pace with the camera technology: after starting with the Sony BVP-950 we now use…