Zoom Theatre

SHL’s Jo Walton interviewed Natasha Rickman, director of The Time Machine: A Virtual Reality, about the experience of switching a play from a site specific promenade production to a digital experience halfway through the run. Full interview here.

I suppose for actors it’s a weird combination of acting for screen and theatre. One thing to get used to is the fact that, if you’re going to pull the camera to you, you need to be making noise. That means that if you’re playing any lingering moments of beautiful silence that you’re playing, the audience won’t be seeing that. In fact, what they can see is your other actor who is having to do a lot of thinking and listening acting — not even listening, actually, if you’re not making any sound! You have to play the thoughts more quickly, I think. The thoughts have to come to characters more quickly in this, and if you want a moment of silence before a character speaks, then you actually have to build that in explicitly, because someone needs to be spotlighting you.