Why I’m not watching big culture on the small screen

I have a confession to make... It’s not really a confession, it just feels like one given my professional background. I haven’t watched any of the big productions from the National Theatre or Royal Opera House on YouTube. Actually, it’s worse than that: I’ve started them, but I can’t finish them. In fact, I don’t last long at all. I’ve been to see quite a few in the cinema. NT Live was a great way to see Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. I wasn’t sure it would be “my thing” and so fifteen quid with the option to pop out for a beer or more popcorn if it got a bit slow seemed ideal. In the same way, I think I enjoyed Angels in America as a "live broadcast" in the cinema more than some of my friends who saw it in person at the theatre, plus I didn’t have to queue up for day tickets (which I never do - who has time?!).

I just am not enjoying these broadcasts on my telly (which is tbh too big for the size of my lounge - so it’s not exactly screen size) or my laptop; a bit like watching Avatar on an in-flight entertainment system. It just doesn't feel like I matter, like it matters. Every sweep of the audience or wide shot just reminds me that this is recorded, I’m not there, there’s no peril. Rather than the TV window transporting me to another domain, it’s a mirror reminding me that my date with Jake [Gyllenhall, Sunday in the Park with George] (lol, I wish) has been postponed to next year. I can’t help thinking maybe I’d be enjoying that new interactive Unbreakable Kimmy Scmidt more; or that I could be watching a super woke and contemporary multi-lingual melodrama (House of Flowers if you’re wondering) - both on Netflix.

I probably will watch ROH’s Metamorphoses. Something about dance captured well seems to work better for me than theatre when it’s streamed - maybe I’m just a child of the music video... MTV, Top of the Pops and the Box. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed the BBC’s short dance films. I would def recommend the absolutely stunning Clowns by Hofesch Schecter. It’s somehow both funny and scary with a relatively diverse cast. I think the lack of dialogue lets me view the work more like a piece of video art. It’s captured in a way that feels really intimate and there aren’t any shots of the audience (I don’t think there was an audience in this case) to jog me into remembering I’m watching a recording of the thing. Perhaps this is what Walter Benjamin means by the loss of aura [https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/aura].

My husband’s finishing a dissertation, so doesn’t have time to watch the full 2 and a quarter hours of La Traviata right now and Colin (my cat) doesn’t have much to say about opera - so maybe if I used one of those newly popular “watch together” apps I’d get more from it. Just to be clear, I’m not saying my response is in any way “right” or “normal” nor “abnormal”... but it has got me wondering what makes a good performing arts experience in a digital-first age? I have no answers yet, but I did learn a lot in running a digital-first production company Social Convention. Our LABS programme got a long way to figuring out some paths forward. It was an exploratory committee of artists and weirdos, a digital residency cum open studio to start building a suddenly more populated virtual space. If I learn anything, I’ll let you know. For now though I’ve got to run - I have a Zoom meeting.

Update: this blog was first published during the 2019 COVID lockdown. The LABS programme and Social Convention allowed me to go on to develop a new online live event workflow and tech stack (Interactive Performance Maker) through the Resident Entrepreneur programme at Creative Informatics, Edinburgh. The end of the pandemic thrust us into a new paradigm of hybrid-first, a simultaneous in-person and online, approach, with all the complexity that brings. Writing now, at the start of 2026 it feels like we made a great leap forward in tech adoption during the pandemic, but in terms of how we work and how we experience culture, it seems to not really have changed much. Taking up the role of Research Fellow at the CoSTAR Foresight Lab is an exciting step in exploring not just what trends are emerging in this space, but more importantly what future paths we can take toward equitable creative futures, and what positions we need to build in order to do so. I will keep you posted...