One of my big disappointments in this year of pandemic lockdown was the cancellation of all of the Shakespeare festivals I normally would have attended during the summer and into the fall. But this afternoon, I got to experience a live production of King Lear by the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, performed in a distanced manner over the internet. This is the festival that normally does the Free Shakespeare in the Park performances during the summer. Apparently some theaters have produced plays using Zoom, where each actor appears in their own box in a matrix. This production was unique in that all of the actors were performing physically separated and used green screens, then they were composited together against different backgrounds appropriate for each scene. Apparently the actors couldn’t see each other, only hear each other. The resulting video quality wasn’t great, and the green screen artifacts were quite noticeable, but overall it worked as a play. Visually it was a little sketchy, but considering what they were doing it was quite impressive.
In this production they had the lead be a female, but still referred to her as King. It gave a few scenes a little different flavor, but no major difference. There was also periodic inter-scene sound effects of news reports on BLM unrest to try and make it timely. The setting was supposed to be America, but this was only superficially noticeable. They were clever in the way they had to appear to pass items between actors, or do stage fights. It was good to be able to see at least one “live” production this summer. Hopefully things won’t be shutdown forever.